[wellylug] Re: Registry type question

[Grant McLean]

Peter Jones wrote:
 > Does Linux have anything directy equivalent to the
 > Windows registry?

Good lord I hope not! :-)

 > This got me wondering where Linux keeps all it needs
 > to know about itself and how large this info would be.

The Unix philosophy is that configuration settings which
affect the whole system live in plain text files under
/etc.  For example static mappings of hostnames to IP
addresses live in /etc/hosts; user and group definitions
live in /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow and /etc/group.  The
startup sequence for programs started at boot time is
usually defined using shell scripts in /etc/init.d and
/etc/rc*.d.  My RedHat system puts lots of stuff under
/etc/sysconfig.

The Unix philosophy for user-specific settings is to
store them in plain text files in the users home
directory.  These files are usually named with a '.'
as the first character of the filename so that they
only show up in an 'ls' listing if you do 'ls -a'.
They are generically referred to as 'dot files'.

The advantage of the Windows approach is that if you're
looking for a setting, you can be prettysure it's in the
registry.  One disadvantage is that it is extremely
difficult to find anything in the registry.  Another is
that corruption of the registry can render your whole
system unusable.

The primary advantage of the Unix approach is openness
- it's easy to read/search/modify text files using the
wealth of tools which come with Unix.  For example,
once you've customised an application, you can give
another user the same customisations by simply giving
them a copy of the application's dot file (try that
with MS Word!).

The primary disadvantage is that every application uses
it's own format of config file and some of them live in
'surprising' places.  Some are simple (eg: /etc/hosts)
some are a bit more complex (eg: /etc/printcap) and some
are just so bizarre they'll send you running screaming
back to Windows (eg: sendmail.cf).  My preference with
apps I develop is to use an XML format for config files.

Having said all that, I believe the GNOME developers
have built some kind of registry.  My initial impression
is that this is an extremely misguided project but I
haven't examined their motivation or their code so that's
just knee-jerk bigotry on my part.

Cheers
Grant




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