Windows woes

[Jari-Matti Mäkelä]

pragma wrote:
> In article <e0dtb1$2mld$1 at digitaldaemon.com>, Juan Jose Comellas says...
>> At some point in the past, the only way to be able to be certified
>> "Windows-logo compatible" was if you used the registry to save your
>> program's settings. I guess they wanted to make it really difficult to
>> switch computers without reinstalling. The registry is probably the worst
>> abomination to come from Redmond and it's the cause of most of the problems
>> Windows has.
> 
> Here's how I look at it.  The registry works fantastic for a few things:
> 
> 1) Making explorer do file type magic
> 2) OLE/Drag-and-Drop interoperability (more file type registration and metadata)
> 3) COM registry
> 4) Application initalization
> 
> .. but design wise it has the following drawbacks:
> 
> 1) Behaves as its own entity in memory (can you say "cache-thrashing"?)
> 2) Has its own LRU algorithm and behavior
> 3) Is prone to bloat, as applications abuse it in various ways

IMO the worst thing is that you really can't separate all the per-user
settings from the system-wide configuration. That makes it impossible to
backup your personal data without 3rd party programs. In *nixes it's
damn easy to backup your home directory without any problems and restore
all data to another system in a breeze. Even a newbie can do that.

> Why they didn't just come up with a universal configuraiton file tree ( /etc
> anyone? ), with filesystem drivers that feature superior or tree-specific
> caching, I'll never know.  In every possible way, it would have provided a more
> stable configuration, for about half as much engineering.

FAT-file systems used to have bad space efficiency. Currently a complex
registry would require you to have at least reiserfs4 to work fast enough.

-- 
Jari-Matti