Re: Icons of program

[Andreas Kostyrka <andreas rainbow studorg tuwien ac at>]

On 22 Apr 1998, Miroslav Silovic wrote:

> Matt Kimball <mkimball@xmission.com> writes:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> You also missed the fact that registry is not human-readable. Meaning
> you need special tools to edit it, and the special tools are only
Actually we are talking here not about a global config registry, but more
something like a per-file registry.
> available when Windows are already running. So once you hose registry
Not really. As it was said, there would be at least some
extraction/modify/etc. tools as commandline utilities.

And it probably doesn't store too vital informations, it stores only
informations about a file, so at worst the file is unusable, and at the
point that you want to use the information, you've already have the GNOME
desktop up and running. (What else is the icon of a file needed, or the
window layout of the app, the creator of a file, etc.?)

> beyond recovery, if you don't have a backup, there is absolutely no 
> way to fix the problem (short of reinstall). UNIX textfiles are
Only true if you don't have the tools.
> editable by hand so the system can always be brought back into a
> bootable state (well, as long as filesystem is still alive) - you just
> boot it from the floppy, mount the hard disk and edit the
> configuration.
Ok, you boot the system and either:
- start the text mode editor program.
- extract the resources, and edit them with your favorite program.
  Afterwards you infuse the resources into the file again.
- extract and remove the resources, and startup the system with the
  default values.
> 
> Basically a large binary file that can only be modified if GNOME is
Exactly the point. That's why textmode utilities are IMPORTANT.
> already running can be equivalent to locking the car keys inside your
> car.

Andreas