no Registry required

[dp]

LOL! Before Windows '95, Microsoft used separate .ini files -- text files, that were scattered all over. It was a disaster keeping track of .ini changes all over the place.

It's certainly worth laughing about. Win95 left no legacy and had no peers. There's a reason it's gone from the landscape. It was a really bad idea.

Having a centralized registry allows the OS to keep everything in one place, and keep track of changes. It's also a clean way to segregate the hardware configuration (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE) from the user configurations (HKEY_USERS).

In practice it's been a problematic solution - it puts all of one's eggs in one basket. Unlike distributed configuration files (there is order to it even if it seems otherwise to some), a single error in the registry can crash the OS and leave a difficult recovery ahead.

Bottom line: any OS has to keep the same registry data somewhere, so pick your poison: separate config files in /usr/etc or one giant config file: the registry.

Thanks - I'll take /etc, please

Depends on the Unix. Mac OS X is built on the NextStep object-oriented framework that's layered on top of the Mach (BSD) kernel. Mac OS keeps the registry data in object-oriented databases called "PropertyLists" or PLists. For you Mac users out there: do a file search on the .plist extension.

plist files are not very different at all from the now commonplace xml files used universally by applications regardless of the os. They're a good solution, and a failure of one limits the damage to the related application or service. And Mac is not the only OS that uses plist files. Solaris from Sun and Linux use them, too, because they make sense.