I have worked with Windows registry for at least 2 decades and it is one of the things I rally hate about design of Windows (and I like the way config files are kept in Linux).
A very big virtual file system (with a parallel access API of its own) inside a very big (at that time, slower) file system (and its own API). I wish Windows limited its config to only pure file-system file. Simple and flat, instead of this mess of over 100 MBs which has been itself a source of many vulnerabilities. The legacy baggage is also terrible.
Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)
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Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)
#342Earlier 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.
Guix makes a big deal out of being fully reproducible. It is possible to pin versions, you basically state "I want package X while the guix repository is at commit hash Y". Every dependency of the package will be built and made available at the appropriate version and everything will work out. I used this to roll back fprintd when it broke due to a broken dependency and it worked without problems.