What's the perfect (OS independent) way of storing filepaths ?

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

In message <gdkh1o$9f5$1 at rumours.uwaterloo.ca>, Ross Ridge wrote:

> Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo at geek-central.gen.new_zealand> wrote:
>
>> Ross Ridge wrote:
>
>>> However, the normal place to store settings on Windows is in the
>>> registry.
>
>> Which becomes a single point of failure for the whole system.
> 
> As opposed to the file system being the single point failure?

The file system is involved regardless. But leaving out an additional layer
of failure on top of it does make things more robust, yes. The file system
already has provisions for simultaneous access by multiple processes,
journalling, integrity checking etc; implementing a "registry" on top of
this means reinventing a whole separate API and architecture that has to
provide this sort of thing, or leave it out and suffer the well-known
consequences.

Plus the fact that the Windows Registry is actually a munging together of
things that are kept in quite separate places in Unix/Linux: system config
files versus shared read-only data versus writable data versus user prefs
etc. Putting all these things together just makes it more likely that
somebody will clobber something it didn't mean to.