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On Tue, 16 Dec 1997, Michael L. VanLoon -- HeadCandy.com wrote:

> If your complaint, however, is that the registry is "unreliable"
> because of the way software stores data in it (i. e. a program can
> stomp something another program considers important), then I think you
> are mis-using the term.

No.  The basic idea of a single database shared by all applications,
venndor, third-party, and local _is_ an unreliable design.  It violates
the principle of minimizing the damage any one component of a system can
do by breaking.

Under 95 or NT, installing a botched install of _anything_ which uses
the registry, from a commercial databse application to a desktop
calculator can break anything (or everything) which depends on the
registry -- including the OS itself.

> Write something that can take a registry "snap-shot", and diff
> snap-shots from before and after.  There are already a few commercial
> programs that will do this for you.

A few?  With the current system, I have a myriad of wonderful tools to
manipulate my config files with...  RCS, diff, grep, sed, awk, etc...

> And, in your example, it seems to me you'd either live with
> application B's changes, or roll back to A and nuke B altogether.  If
> there is a clash, it's possible they can't co-exist.

Exactly.  In the world of /etc there isn't much chance of such a clash,
is there?  The fact is, unlike the Windows world, Unix users have never
had to adapt to being told  ``You can't do A and B together b/c although
completely unrelated they break when both installed.''  Let's not start
now...

> In reality, I've seen relatively little of this happen, since
> application data is generally stored under a vendor-specific key, and
> most competent vendors are capable of keeping their own software
> co-existing within their own subset of the registry.

But an incompetent vendor is in danger of breaking not only their own
configuration but that of the OS as a whole, and of any other
application.  Why is this desirable?

> But I'm sure everyone has a different set of experience, and just one
> bad "application" can make for a lot of pain.  We may see more of this
> as more and more applications try to supply a common set of
> "services".  Though this will probably happen on a whole larger scale,
> such as a distributed directory.

I've used ODM under AIX, Netinfo under NeXTStep, and to a lesser extent
NDS, and the '95 and NT registries.  I've been stuck cleaning up after
corruptions of all of the above...  In my (much more extensive) UNIX
career, I've almost never seen /etc get so hosed as to prevent system
function, except where the filesystem as a whole was lost...

- --
				Jim Wise
				jim.wise@turner.com

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