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Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

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Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#151

Post by vimsee »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #140
mikepurvis wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest issue with etc is that it's owned by root and therefore read only from the application's point of view. So, a great fit for sysadmin-managed configuration, not so great for applications that are GUI-configurable. You end up with a tiered approach of defaults in lib, and cascaded overrides in etc and var.

It's a great thing about etc. If your application `foobar` wants to write something to /etc and doesn't have root privileges (which it probably shouldn't), create a subdirectory /etc/foobar with owner `foobar:foober`, and write there all you want. Many applications do that and it works fine.

I have not seen any applications creating a user with the applications name. How can one avoid a naming conflict? Kate (a text editor) might be installed on a system by Kate (a person). What I have noticed however is that there are daemons running as root and is used as a "middle man" whenever an application running as a normal user needs some extra privilege.

Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#153

Post by tpoacher »

stockerta wrote: post #35
bluetomcat wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The UNIX way is undeniably more flexible since it isn't a virtual filesystem, it is just a filesystem. Unix simply doesn't have a "way" in that regard, other than a loose convention to put text files in "/etc". Every application comes up with its own format. Parsing that file is application-specific. Updating a value in a text file means re-writing the whole file again. It is a technically-inferior approach that ha…

I hate this fanatical love of the UNIX way. I really hate that as of today Windows is the only non UNIX OS. I trully believe that this fact set us back. No more exciting new OSes only boring unix.

Actually there are lots of exciting non unix OS.

https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=links

It's just that they don't have market share or a raison-d'etre for widespread adoption.

Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#154

Post by JadeNB »

The article refers to "by the NT debug symbols that one paper has reproduced", linking to http://amnesia.gtisc.gatech.edu/~moyix/suzibandit.ltd.uk/MSc>, but that link was dead. (If you want your links to be useful to the future, don't title links 'one paper'!) According to the Wayback Machine, it was an M.Sc. thesis by Peter Norris called "The Internal Structure of the Windows Registry" (https://web.archive.org/web/20200808224213/http://amnesia.gt...).

Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#155

Post by AtNightWeCode »

Someone1234 wrote: post #9

I really appreciate when people use technical facts to criticize something, like with this. It is a well written take-down of the implementation of the Windows Registry as of both today and 2010. I suspect if the concept of the registry was created today it would look more like a database (e.g. Sqlite), although organizing it like a virtual FileSystem does have a certain appeal, and unfortunately I don't know of a da…

There is nothing wrong with a kv hierarchy for config. Used in more modern tools as well like Consul. The problem here is the poor implementation and naive security considerations.

Today, there is no broadly used file system that can replace any of this. The difference in performance is just too big.

Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#156

Post by nomel »

f1refly wrote: post #88
stockerta wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate this fanatical love of the UNIX way. I really hate that as of today Windows is the only non UNIX OS. I trully believe that this fact set us back. No more exciting new OSes only boring unix.

The people at nixos and guix are doing it differently. No longer is the configurarion just state in files, scattered who knows where that cannot be understood fully by anyone. Insteady everything is defined centrally and then neatly versioned and managed by the system. If you think the unix way of throwing files in a directory sucks, check them out!

This sounds incredible, assuming there's a clean way to pin versions/source of applications. It might make the fabled idea of a reproducible system possible.

Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#158

Post by wqweto »

cletus wrote: post #4

This is a weird article because you can't talk about the structure of the Windows Registry without talking about INI files [1]. Example: [owner] name = John Doe organization = Acme Widgets Inc. Some comments on the post mention INI files. It's mentioned by commenters in the previous HN submission too. But the Registry was built like it was to easily translate INI files into a semi-filesystem structure. [1]: https://e…

The hierarchical nature of the registry elevates old INI files to at least TOML format in this regard :-))

Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#159

Post by nomel »

trevorishere wrote: post #59
bluetomcat wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a more philosophical level, the Unix convention is the "liberal" one, giving application writers more freedoms. Liberty enables more flexible applications and more chaos at the same time. A highly structured approach might be beneficial in the short run, but it might prove to be burdening beyond its due date.

Application writers are free to use which ever format they choose on Windows, as well. The Registry is just yet another option -- Microsoft does not force developers to use it. I don't see the Unix convention as the more "liberal" one, here. It typically has _one less_ option.

> The Registry is just yet another option

It's not just "another option". It's a system standard option that exists, and can be easily accessed programmatically. There's no equivalent in Unix, since there is no standard, and whatever is available will depend on the distribution.

"Here's a built in option, but do whatever" is very different than "do whatever!".

Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#160

Post by imtringued »

gizmo wrote: post #86
silvestrov wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I was to reimplement it, I would not let any app read the DB directly. Instead I would make an HTTP like interface where you talk to a service that provides the get/set functionality and which always use a text format like an extended JSON with native support for date, int32, etc. This also enabled much easier and better backwards compability as you can specify app-version in the requests, so a version 5 server ca…

You can do everything you describe with a regular function call. Introducing an unnecessary service for something as trivial as config management is even worse than the broken Registry status quo.

In theory all we need is a libconfig with a standardized interface and distro specific implementations.

There would be two use cases, storing hierarchical/tree like data aka JSON, YAML, etc and arbitrary graph like data with complex references.

The same could be done with the shell. libcli would be called to parse the command line arguments and your program will have an entry point that receives the parsed data.

libcli could also be used to produce structured program outputs which then can be fed into applications, possibly skipping the serialisation deserialization steps.

Since libcli will have a standard interface each distro can choose their own CLI format or whether they output their data as JSON or CBOR.

In both cases the benefit is that the choice of the data storage mechanism has been decoupled from the application.

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