[wellylug] Re: Registry type question

[Steve Baker]

Mr McLean knee-jerked:
> 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.

I've done a little bit of development with GConf which is the GNOME
configuration system. Conceptually it is a registry but it avoids many
of the pitfalls of Microsoft's approach and I think it is quite nifty.

The main reasons the MS registry has such a bad reputation stem from it
being a single file binary database. This results in the performance of
your PC degrading over time as your registry gets larger. Also as has
already mentioned the registry is prone to corruption.

GConf avoids this main fault by storing the configuation tree as a
directory tree of xml files instead of a single binary database. This
ensures that the GConf database can scale to a large size without
slowing your apps.

The backend storage engines can be mixed and matched too, so the XML
storage engine could be replaced with (for example) a centralised
database. This would allow sysadmins to have control over the app
configuration for hundreds of users from a central location (something
which may aid Linux's takeover of the corporate desktop ;)

Another advantage of GConf is that your apps will be notified when a
configuration option changes, so global options will take effect
immediately without an app restart no matter where the change came from.

The biggest downside I have come across is that all this is controlled
by a per-user daemon. If this daemon dies then all of your apps will
start to behave strangely and your're basically a bit screwed.

Of course this only happens to me because I use untested developer
snapshots of GNOME ;)

cheers

-- 
Steve Baker <stevebaker_org at yahoo.co.uk>

http://careers.yahoo.com.au - Yahoo! Careers
- 1,000's of jobs waiting online for you!

  .-.   Wellington
  /V\   Linux
 // \\  Users       
/(   )\ Group
 ^^-^^
        http://wlug.paradise.net.nz/

To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
wellylug-unsubscribe at egroups.com
  

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/