It's all about choice - or lack of

Posted May 19, 2004 13:36 UTC (Wed) by Arker (guest, #14205) [Link]

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing about the resemblence to the windows registry. That's a truly horrible thing, the thought that it's being imitated in a piece of Free Software is utterly horrifying. A preference page in the GUI, and a simple flat text file for those that want more control - what's so hard about that?

Posted May 19, 2004 13:57 UTC (Wed) by Prototerm (guest, #20227) [Link]

The Registry was one of the absolute worst features added to Windows. A set of flat files in some sort of configuration directory works much better. Easily read by humans, and easily copied to backup. Nowadays, finding a particular windows setting has become a frustrating game of hide-and-seek. I would really hate to see Linux go that route.

It's one thing to clone the look-and-feel of Windows, but do we have to copy the mistakes, too? What's next, add Windows' security flaws?

Posted May 19, 2004 14:37 UTC (Wed) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227) [Link]

Read this:
http://www.whiprush.org/2004/05/crack_pipes_for.html

Specifically, note the paragraph:
"GConf is nothing like the Windows Registry, except for the similar appearance of their respective editors. If Mr. Petreley cares to compare and contrast GConf and the Windows Registry he would know this. In fact Nicholas, I will paypal you $100 US if you can name three architectural similarities between GConf and the Registry."

For the record, just about every piece of software in existance has some kind of registry. All of them. KDE, Apache, the Linux kernel, everything. GNOME just happens to have a graphical tool that displays that registry in a generic fashion a la regedit. You're free to use a command line tool to set keys (just like you would with the Linux kernel "registry keys" in /proc/sys), edit the files directly, etc.

Can GConf get corrupted at times? Sure. So can all your dot files in $HOME, your server configuration files in /etc, and so on. I'd had more broken config files caused by apps that try to code whole config file parsers and make mistakes (instead of using an existing, debugged, well tested framework like GConf or KConfig), broken scripts making mistakes updating config files, and odd ball config editors like debconf than I can count. I've not once ever had my GConf registry corrupted. (I *have* had individual apps with bugs write invalid values to GConf and stop working; they would have stopped working just the same if they had used a custom config file that they wrote invalid values to as well.)