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Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

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Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#241

Post by nomel »

trevorishere wrote: post #169
nomel wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!".

Do you know where Microsoft calls out the Registry as the current best practice in https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/ ?

My point was that having something built into the system is very different than having a dependency stricken free for all that is outside of the system. For this reason, especially for the majority of Window's life, it was not just "another option", it was a "hey, this is built in" option.

As your link show, Windows has homogeneity, with good config options built into the frameworks. In those frameworks, those built in config options can't be consider just "another option". There's no real homogeneity in *nix, so the only options is misc files to put misc paths.

Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#243

Post by jbverschoor »

hiptobecubic wrote: post #104
jbverschoor wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point about /etc is that it’s just one part of “configuration”. There’s no /etc for users. That’s why we get all these dot.dirs. At least some apps use ~/.config/

.config/ and .local/ are the de facto /etc for users, but there is the set of XDG_ environment variables that are intended to fill that role.

Well, my git, ssh, caches of what not, almost everything is in my home directory directly. It's even worse than "My Documents"

Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#244

Post by MaxBarraclough »

bluetomcat wrote: post #15
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…

> 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…

> a loose convention to put text files in "/etc".

For user-specific configuration there's also ~, as with ~/.vimrc and ~/.bashrc. Windows has something similar in C:\Users\theuser\AppData.

edit And ~/.config/, as others have mentioned.

Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#245

Post by moffkalast »

cpeterso wrote: post #150

Why is a registry file called a "hive"? > Because one of the original developers of Windows NT hated bees. So the developer who was responsible for the registry snuck in as many bee references as he could. A registry file is called a “hive”, and registry data are stored in “cells”, which is what honeycombs are made of. Source: Raymond Chen, 2003: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030808-00/?p=42...

That must sting.

Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#246

Post by babypuncher »

_tom_ wrote: post #178
mvaliente2001 wrote: post #177

https://www.libelektra.org/home is an attempt to bring a registry to linux. It doesn't have the problems of its windows equivalent. I wish this project was more popular.

Why? The windows registry is a disaster. The whole idea is wrong. You want to keep configuration with the thing being configured. Most Mac installs are "drag the folder on to your disk". You are done.

I agree. I much prefer my software to store it's configuration in AppData in Windows and in the user's home directory in Linux.

It makes migrating all your app settings to new machines or fresh installs way easier.

Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#247

Post by ipv6ipv4 »

My impression from a past life working with the innards of Windows was that Microsoft weaponized terrible software engineering practices into a business advantage. The awful underlying implementations made it very hard for competitors to reverse engineer anything and build compatible products. Sometimes, it even made it exceedingly hard to write drivers for Windows because of unresolvable race conditions in the kernel.

Some of the best examples are CIFS/SMB and DCE/RPC over SMB which were bottomless pits of awful.

One of my favorite anecdotes is the SMB print service described as the work of a clueless college student by one of the Samba developers who reverse engineered it.

Microsoft cleaned up very quickly once DOJ forced SMB 2.0 (or whatever it was called) to be documented.

Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#248

Post by t0mek »

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…

> although organizing it like a virtual FileSystem does have a certain appeal, and unfortunately I don't know of a database engine that supports such a layout

Apache Jackrabbit Oak [1] implements a tree-format data model called JCR [2]. It's used as database engine for the Adobe Experience Manager (enterprise-level CMS).

[1] https://jackrabbit.apache.org/oak/docs/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_repository_API_for_Jav...

Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#249

Post by civilized »

cpeterso wrote: post #150

Why is a registry file called a "hive"? > Because one of the original developers of Windows NT hated bees. So the developer who was responsible for the registry snuck in as many bee references as he could. A registry file is called a “hive”, and registry data are stored in “cells”, which is what honeycombs are made of. Source: Raymond Chen, 2003: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030808-00/?p=42...

Our digital world, built by trolls.

Most of them WASPs.

Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#250

Post by dmitriid »

yndoendo wrote: post #226
pie_flavor wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The registry does not impact those users' experience. Needing to learn how to use a shell, does.

I would disagree that it does impact users' experience because when the registry gets corrupt you have to start by installing Windows from scratch. Nothing like Windows 10 update disabling registry backups to save space on low capacity storage and finding out after the fact when attempting to recover Windows 10. Secondly with device drivers being tied to the registry there is not a simple system upgrade of taking out…

I've reinstalled Linux due to borked sound on update way more times than I reinstalled Windows due to corrupt registry.

And cumulatively I spent significantly less time on Linux than I did on Windows.

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