Re: Icons of program

[Matt Kimball <mkimball xmission com>]

On Tue, Apr 21, 1998 at 11:17:49PM -0400, Fred Bacon wrote:
> This is going to sound like a terribly naive question.  I've never used
> Microsoft Windows in any incarnation, 3.1, 95 or NT.  What is it with
> the Registry that is so difficult?  People act as though it's the
> Devil's spawn.  I've never used it, so I honestly don't understand
> what's so evil about it.

There are three main problems with it:

*  The code used to manage it seems to have some subtle bugs in it,
   causing it to be corrupted rather often.  (Ok, not *that* often,
   but if you have a building full of Windows machine which experience
   heavy use, you are likely to have problems often enough that it can
   become a serious nuisance).

*  Device driver and other startup information is stored there.  This
   means that if it gets corrupted, you can have trouble booting.

*  Windows backs up the registry as part of the boot sequence, and
   most people don't make other backups of the registry.

If you removed any one of these three things, it wouldn't be so bad.
But since all three are the case under Windows, it can be pretty bad.
Especially when Windows backs up a corrupted registry, and you need to
reinstall Windows to fix the problem.

As an applications programmer, I *really* like the idea the registry
as a place to store preference information.  (I'll be putting on my
asbestos suit here).  It is very convenient, and isn't as messy as
preference files hanging around in the application's directory or the
user's home directory.  As an app programmer, one just needs to be
careful to do something sensible if the registry information is
somehow corrupted.

And I don't see that much difference between a filesystem and a
registry, really.  People argue that it is too unsafe to store
important system information in a database like that, but isn't that
what a filesystem is?  Just because Microsoft came up with a poor
implementation doesn't mean that the whole concept is bad.

Matt Kimball
mkimball@xmission.com