LinuxRegistry in Freedesktop & KDE

[Sean Middleditch]

On Fri, 2004-04-16 at 02:36, Duncan Mac-Vicar Prett wrote:
> Hello guys.
> 
> Surfing in Freedesktop website I found a pointer to GConf as a interesting 
> pointer a shared configuration system for Linux. Writing configuration tools 
> for Linux will be a pain & hack until we have a consistent and common way to 
> store configuration.
> 
> Searching for more technologies, made me land at  the Linux Registry project 
> (http://registry.sf.net), by IBM employee Avi Alkalay.

Some things that look very un-yummy about it:

"Very small applications must open their database to get values. The
Linux Registry will only open very small files when requested; one file
per key."

GConf is moving in the other direction as its been shown that all those
little files are very innefficient; most apps want to read *all* their
keys, not just one or two.  Reading them all when they're one per file
is very slow/inefficient, especially if you have more than a handful of
keys.  (Like most real-world applications would.)

It also seems to lack change notifications, which means it's only useful
for very simplistic applications.  If you edit the keys while the app is
running, your edits will probably just be over-written.  Any
configuration keys which need to be shared among different apps won't
work very cleanly without adding a wrapper daemon.  So we'd need to
write and standardize on one of these, as well, which would be a lot
more work than the basic file backend, which is really all Linux
Registry is...

I also don't see a clean way of managing system defaults or lock-down
(other than write-protecting files).  All in all, this software doesn't
seem to be much more than a wrapper for reading in the data of a set of
files in a tree.  Nothing particularly earth shaking or interesting
given how many problems it fails to even attempt to solve.
-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis at awesomeplay.com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.