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

[Ross Ridge]

Ross Ridge wrote:
> As opposed to the file system being the single point failure?

Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo at geek-central.gen.new_zealand> wrote:
>The file system is involved regardless. But leaving out an additional
>layer of failure on top of it does make things more robust, yes.

No, that doesn't follow.  Having TCP as layer on top of IP doesn't make
the Internet less robust even though it's additional point of failure.
For the matter, settings files also have an additional layer of failure
in the code that intreprets and updates the setting files.

>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.

If settings files benefit from those provisions of the filesystem then
so does the registry.  If the registry needs additional provisions so
do settings files for the same reasons.

>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.

Nope.  Microsoft implemented the registry because users were clobbering
things they weren't ment to, and it succeded in making it a less likely
occurence.

					Ross Ridge

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