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

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

In message <gdlsr7$n59$1 at rumours.uwaterloo.ca>, Ross Ridge wrote:

> 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.

Which is a vacuous example.

> For the matter, settings files also have an additional layer of failure
> in the code that intreprets and updates the setting files.

See, it's clear you're too accustomed to the Windows mentality:
under "settings files" you're subsuming system config files, read-only
shared data, writeable data and per-user prefs--a whole bunch of things.
Recognize the distinction between these, and the fact that they need to be
kept distinct, and you can see how your assertions no longer hold up.

>>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.

Quite different reasons, as I pointed out above.

>>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.

<http://www.google.co.nz/search?q=registry+damage+prone>