Not the registry

Not the registry

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.)