Windows woes

[S. Chancellor]

On 2006-03-29 09:19:27 -0800, Jari-Matti Mäkelä <jmjmak at utu.fi.invalid> said:

> 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.

Much of the registry is stored in data files in your documents and 
settings folder.

> 
>> 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.

That is absolutely not true.  Not to mention that they use NTFS now.  
If you're talking about storing a file for each variable, you missed 
the point of the original comment.  Switching to everything used 
per-app XML files would simply require changing the behavior of the 
Registry function calls.

-S.