191–200 of 342 posts
Because some, perhaps many, have abused the originally good idea, does not invalidate its positive aspects.
Also, I do not agree it is a file system. It is a key-value storage system that is leagues better than the win.ini, system.ini, and the prolific ini file collection hell it replaced.
Some form of version control would make the registry better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What UNIX way? The religious text files scattered everywhere on the FOSS clones? The adoption of registry ideas by GNOME on gconf? The configuration databases used by HP-UX and Aix? The plists used by NeXTSTEP and macOS? The settings per app used on Android (technically UNIX based at its Linux kernel)
Exactly this. Unix is a bit of a mess, at least that's understandable because it's 'open'. MS registry is a bit nutty, it should be refactored in some simple, clean way, which is apparently extremely difficult to do for big companies, especially those that consider 'backwards compatibility' to be 'everything'.
A point being overlooked by article and commenters: the records in the registry probably use in the order of 10-100 bytes each, while every actual file takes up at least around 1024 (EDIT: maybe more like 4096?) bytes. Putting tiny 'files' into a special format is a no-brainer on the older computers that existed when the Registry was first created. I am assuming this was one of the motivations to create the Registry…
On ext4, a file of 160 bytes or less (and no xattrs) can be stored inline in the inode[1], so the whole thing takes up 256 bytes (plus 8 + [length of filename] for the directory entry). I don’t think any Unix filesystem did that in 1989, but the problem is not unsolvable, especially given that you are hardly going to use a configuration file to store a single value. NTFS does the same, actually, except it can’t count…
Different times...
i think the windows registry probably sucks because windows was primarily built to enable developers and end users to use microcomputers to make money (where messes are acceptable as long as it makes money) and unix differs in that it was built to enable telephony engineers to operate a telephone network reliably and efficiently. so if you're an engineer or scientist or care about operations, you like unix style syst…
This is a corporate revision of Unix's history: it was originally created to run a video game[1]. Later, when Bell Labs gave that team some more resources (in the form of a PDP-11), the first "business" applications they wrote for it were primarily for typesetting and text editing.
Telephony was never a primary design goal for Unix, even if telephone networks were later retrofitted onto it. This is evidenced by the fact that Bell gave early versions of Unix away, as they were forbidden to charge for non-communications technologies and services under a federal consent decree.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134307 (2010)
Why the Windows Registry sucks … technically - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134307 - Feb 2010 (61 comments)
(it's on my list to write software to do this automatically for links to past threads - or maybe to offer users the option when they post a comment with HN links in it)
i think the windows registry probably sucks because windows was primarily built to enable developers and end users to use microcomputers to make money (where messes are acceptable as long as it makes money) and unix differs in that it was built to enable telephony engineers to operate a telephone network reliably and efficiently. so if you're an engineer or scientist or care about operations, you like unix style syst…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The latest release has included "flakes", promoted from an add-on to an opt-in feature and which, among other things, lets me pin my dependencies and the environment I need to build my private projects. I then don't have to worry about going out of sync with the main package set, and I can share private projects in a (hopefully) fully reproducible way, with people using different versions of nix.
> This is a far cry from /etc/progname.conf in Linux. Some of these arguments are not really in good faith. First, this isn't a technical issue with the registry, but with how it's been used over the years and never "refactored" - a distinct issue. Second, I dare you to run "ls /etc" and claim it's not a mess... Besides, most of the post is how anyone with a text editor and admin rights can bork/hack the machine. As…
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.
I get where you're coming from, but I think the biggest pro for the "UNIX way" is that text on a filesystem extremely accessible. You don't need a specialized tool to read & modify configuration, you just need a text editor. And while there's no standard for how the data is structured, it's usually pretty easy to figure it out from context. I think it's also really easy to underestimate all the tooling built around t…
The baseline is only text and files on systems that don't have anything better to offer.
The boot loader has to fit in a few sectors so there isn’t really room for SQLite or something.