[wellylug] Re: Registry type question

[sljudd at paradise.net.nz]

Quoting Grant McLean <grantm at web.co.nz>:

> Peter Jones wrote:
>  > Does Linux have anything directy equivalent to the
>  > Windows registry?
> 
> Good lord I hope not! :-)

<snip>
 
>  My RedHat system puts lots of stuff under
> /etc/sysconfig.

But not everything you would expect; in particular I seem to remember Apache's
config files being under the apache install directory, rather than /etc/apache
where Debian puts them. 

Debian's incredibly consistent in this respect. Almost everything lives in /etc.
Which is why I was gobsmacked to discover last night that Debian's xfs keeps its
config file in /usr/X11/lib/fs.

<snip>

> My preference with
> apps I develop is to use an XML format for config files.

The defence of the more traditional formats (usually some variation on 

# explanatory comment
propertyname property value

with whitespace ignored)

is that they are easy to parse, and easy for users to hack by hand. 

Hand-hacked config files often don't play nice with admin tools, though...

> 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.

That would be gconf, described here:

http://developer.gnome.org/feature/archive/gconf/gconf.html

Gconf is rather more sane than the Windows registry. For one thing, it's XML
(because XML is Magic Pixie Dust That Makes Everything Go Better) and therefore
still Unixy, in that it is fundamentally human-readable text.

Stephen

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