[Registry] Re: LinuxRegistry in Freedesktop & KDE

[Paul Sorensen]

I think an evolutionary approach is more like to succeed than a revolutionary
one...we have a good thing at the moment and, yes, it would be nice to make it
better.

One such evolutionary path might be:

1. The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (freestandards.org) continues to gain
momentum (ie. redhat finally succumbs and fully adopts it - alright, a few
others as well).

   1.1. This will mean that configuration files will be in a consistent place
- /etc /etc/opt etcetera

   1.2. Maybe some extremely simple APIs emerge in locating, creating and
opening such files with some consistent naming conventions.

2. There are relatively small number of patterns in the structure of 80% of
these files - maybe some APIs get built to make using these patterns simpler.

3. The Apaches and KDEs of the world begin to adopt these APIs, partly because
of momentum of the standard and because it doesn't change their software
much.

4. Eventually most software is using these APIs and so we have a services
layer that is being used by a *lot* of software that currently is implemented
using files in /etc /etc/opt etcetera.

5. Now we can start thinking about whether it makes sense to implement those
APIs in different ways.

Anyway, just my two cents.
Paul Sorensen