Quote:
Originally Posted by Jay Random
The idea of keeping all your system metadata in one gigantic file is so obviously the Wrong Thing that nobody but Microsoft has ever even considered doing it. Whole volumes have been written on the subject.
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Wrong idea again. This is no different than storing all your precious metadata in /etc. Blow that away, or mess with it substantially, and you are in as deep trouble, guaranteed, as messing with the registry.
You are also ignoring all the good things about the registry facilitates, such as group policy, remote management and configuration of windows machines via the remote registry service, all kinds of things.
Don't forget also, that the registry came about to solve the problem of inconsistent and unweildy .ini files. Those ini files pre-dated XML, so there was no way to enforce strict data type checking, no standard API calls (well, very few) to parse them, etc. Mac OS X had the benefit of not carrying that particular legacy baggage.
At the end of the day, they both have advantages and disadvantages. I would argue though that the registry has a lot more advantages than most people give it credit for.