I'm no way a proponent for replacing the BSD configuration style by
a registry.

> The problem with ODM and Windows registry is that they can easily
> become trashed to the point where one must re-install the OS.

"Easily" must be relative to your point of view. And of course, you
should backup essential stuff like this ;-)

> NT and 95 seem to regularly trash the registry.

For some notion of "regularly" this might be true. I've seen it once
on a Win95 system after severe disk errors. The whole system was replaced
and we had to reinstall therefore anyway.

But besides this, the NT registry isn't that bad. First, it provides a
central place for config information. This is a pro (backup, access rights,
update logs) and a cons (corruption has severe impact). Second, it has
a well done API. At least one version of perl for NT has this API 
compiled in, so you can do nice scripts which update remote registries
over the network with as much intelligence you need to cope varying 
installations on the remote computer (i.e.: the script checks, which
configuration is on the remote machine it's updating and does the 
right thing).

You could do similiar things with our current sheme, but it would be 
a real nightmare to setup the NFS rights (and I didn't want to do that)
or the rdist configuration.


Martin