>as with most good ideas they were pushed beyond logicle and reasonable
limits.  I find way to much CRAP is put in a registry like icq# and misc
information that realy needs to reside with the program incase of emergency.
 

 

I'm with Hans Reiser on this.  The Registry per se exists because MS filesystems do a horrible job of storing small snippets of information.  For example, the command

echo "hello" >test.txt

under most Unices will generally take either 512, 1024 bytes of disk space for the inode, and a few more for the directory entry.  But in MS FAT filesystems, that same file is going to use up as much as 32 (or in a particularly perverse situation, 64) Kb.  It's not quite so horrible under NTFS, but FAT was the norm when the Registry was invented.

 

Of course, reiserfs will stash the file into the directory entry itself, and use very little space.  Why does this matter?  Because it allows the user-specific configuration for ${foo} to be in  ${HOME}/.${foo}rc, and system defaults to /usr/local/${foo}/, or something awfully similar to that. 

 

When I decided to install Ubuntu on this laptop, because I'd made a separate /home partition, which the installer didn't mess with, when I opened Firefox for the first time it not only had all of my preferences exactly as they were, it reopened the same tabs I had opened before.

 

Contrast this to what happened when The Bride of Monster's computer went Tango Uniform a while back.  It had some corrupted files essential for getting XP booted.  I was able to boot her from a Knoppix CD, thence use Samba to move her "My Documents" and desktop directories over to my computer, then run the restore CDs that put her computer back to the exact configuration it was in when she bought it.  At that point, I was able to move her -=DATA=- back, but because confguration data are scattered throughought the Registry, there was nothing to do but reconfigure every application (after reinstalling some of them).