Linux Registry, not only the issues side

[Sean Middleditch]

On Mon, 2004-04-19 at 15:18, Avi Alkalay wrote:
> Havoc, thanks for the suggestions.
> 
> > A question I think you should ask is whether it's worth compromising the
> > design for early boot; you may be able to do much better in the 90% case
> > by leaving the 10% case to plain text files.
> 
> But even if 90% of your (desktop) system is controled by this 10% ?

Who cares?  Early boot is going to basically be super low level system
stuff, like module loading, file system mounting, hotplug, etc.  That
isn't stuff that needs to share any configuration with the desktop or
any other part of the desktop.  Hell, some of those are already moving
to D-BUS notifications, which a config system could (and should, imo) be
layered on top of, so dependencies aren't an issue.

Of any early boot config stuff, the only things that users might ever
conceivably need to manage are basic networking, /etc/fstab,
/etc/modules.conf(on Linux), and the boot loader.  And that's *fine*.  A
small handful of very static files which will almost always be modified
by tools and not humans is no big deal at all.

Don't also forget we're not just talking about human minds here.  We
have some 30 years worth of configuration tools, scripts, books,
applications, etc that depend on current file formats and semantics.  LR
doesn't bring anything to the table worth destroying all that.

You need to also realize that different file formats exist because
different formats are better optimized to different tasks.  Yes, there
is a lot of duplication and incompatibility where it isn't necessary,
but no one system is *ever* going to meet the needs for even a portion
of all apps.  Not everything can be so easily and sanely mapped to a set
of key/value pairs.  Hell, what'd probably happen if LR was forced down
everyone's throats, especially with your decision not to support type
checking/constraints, is that you'd end up with a bunch of incompatible
mini-formats embedded in most key values.

You are not ever, ever going to find a config system that works for
every single application/daemon/whatever.  Even Windows, whom you appear
to be trying to model the uniformity of, has a plethora of
Microsoft-blessed standard configuration file formats!

> 
> Regards,
> Avi
-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis at awesomeplay.com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.