LinuxRegistry in Freedesktop & KDE

[Avi Alkalay]

> Because it requires people to recode for absolutely no real-world gain
> in features or ease or use.  In fact, it's a disservice to users,
> because it would cause all existing knowledge and tools to become
> invalidated.  With no other gain in usability in the new config
> system, that's bloody pointless.

Current tools are inconsistent. Current knowledge is poor. I want my
mother to use Linux as she uses Windows. You'll find good knowledge in
experienced sysadmins. (A free desktop isn't only for geeks). Please
think in the big picture.





> GConf isn't and never will be a standard.  Even the GConf developers
> know better than that.  ~,^  LR just isn't a solution to any real
> problem.  It solves absolutely nothing.  Especially when you're asking
> for "no dependency" config files when LR itself *is* a dependency beyond
> what all existing apps already have...  Those apps could easily have
> used a one file per key structure before, that's very little code to
> write.  There's a *reason* they didn't.

Someday we'll have to set some standards in this area. It is inevitable
for interoperability. We can speak here because we all agreed in the
"english" standard, even if it isn't the best for everybody.

TCP/IP is not big deal also. But before him, computers had to set up a
raw communication. TCP/IP was a very simple, stupid, and straight forward
solution. So simple that it works for everything.






> Aside from the incredibly lack of efficiency in read/write speed caused
> by using those separate files, there's also the extreme wasted disk
> space.  Each and every file takes up a minimum amount of size (usually
> something like 2K or 4K or something) on most FS.

Take care here. It isn't so inefficient. It was not refined yet, and
effieiency is not the only think you must look. Configuration gathering
is a small part of what programs do at startup. And LR nature lets you
get them on demand. So it isn't big deal. And I still want to see GConf
benchmark numbers. So please open your mind and look at the benefits
also.



>  Most of these keys
> are going to be small numbers or very short strings.  LR causes you to
> waste up to 4K or more of diskspace for each of those.  Small system
> friendly, eh? *snort*

Sometimes I think how much disk space is wasted with the compiled code
into each program that handles configuration parsing..... Smaba, Apache,
XFree, init, mount, modprobe, etc, etc. Why not remove it from there and
put all in a shared lib?

Storage is not a big problem today. Memeory is, and this is what people
should look at. Higher level registry-like systems (XML, Corba, Gnome
dependent) had my RAM for dinner last night :-)





> No, we know it does. File system access is slow.  Even when cached,
> it's slower than parsing a single file.  This has been proved over
> and over again since the creation of file-based storage systems.

What about parsing an XML file!? You need *a lot* of memory and memory
handling, that may require swap sometimes.
You should also see what Hans Reiser says about braking files into
smaller ones: http://namesys.com/v4/v4.html#etc_passwd


Thanks for the comments. Comments like these made me change a lot of LR's
design in the begining. But this is past, so please open your mind also
for the benefits first.

Regards,
Avi

-- 
http://www.fastmail.fm - Faster than the air-speed velocity of an
                          unladen european swallow