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> concurrent updates and transactions? From Wikipedia: "The Windows Registry is a hierarchical database that stores low-level settings for the Microsoft Window

> concurrent updates and transactions? From Wikipedia: "The Windows Registry is a hierarchical database that stores low-level settings for the Microsoft Windows operating system and for applications that opt to use the registry." Are we still talking about a configuration archive or a production database for an application? That's when you have to start asking yourself: "is this a sane way to do things?" Because the more you argue for it, the less attractive it becomes as a solution for something that stores configuration data.

orf 8y ago
We're talking about the configuration registry. The one that may require multiple configuration options to be changed in a transactional manner. The one that may have multiple threads or processes reading and writing to the keys (because who knows what stupid devs will do). The one that's a bit more advanced and granular than a config file in /etc/ because it needs to be. Oh yeah, that reminds me, you'd also need to handle subscribing to registry update notifications in this flat-file 'who needs anything other than text files' fantasy. Again, just because you don't grok the problem space doesn't mean its empty.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  > Oh yeah, that reminds me, you'd also need to handle subscribing to registry update notifications in this flat-file 'who needs anything other than text files' fantasy. > Again, just because you don't grok the problem space doesn't mean its empty. Case in point: inotify.
  - SSLy 8y ago
    isn't and isn't going to become recursive over the path
  - orf 8y ago
    has numerous problems as an API and is fiddly and requires every app that wants to listen to do this correctly. Look. Yes you can hack together the registry using flat files, using FS notifications, using the insane transactional FS apis, magically working out how to handle concurrent writes etc and have every process that wants to interact with it implement this correctly. But why. In every sense it is less clean, more complex and generally worse. Wasn't the idea to make it better and cleaner?

orf 8y ago

We're talking about the configuration registry. The one that may require multiple configuration options to be changed in a transactional manner. The one that may have multiple threads or processes reading and writing to the keys (because who knows what stupid devs will do). The one that's a bit more advanced and granular than a config file in /etc/ because it needs to be. Oh yeah, that reminds me, you'd also need to handle subscribing to registry update notifications in this flat-file 'who needs anything other than text files' fantasy. Again, just because you don't grok the problem space doesn't mean its empty.

yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
> Oh yeah, that reminds me, you'd also need to handle subscribing to registry update notifications in this flat-file 'who needs anything other than text files' fantasy. > Again, just because you don't grok the problem space doesn't mean its empty. Case in point: inotify.
- SSLy 8y ago
  isn't and isn't going to become recursive over the path
- orf 8y ago
  has numerous problems as an API and is fiddly and requires every app that wants to listen to do this correctly. Look. Yes you can hack together the registry using flat files, using FS notifications, using the insane transactional FS apis, magically working out how to handle concurrent writes etc and have every process that wants to interact with it implement this correctly. But why. In every sense it is less clean, more complex and generally worse. Wasn't the idea to make it better and cleaner?