On Wed, Mar 23, 2005 at 11:35:04PM +0200, Nadav Har'El wrote: > On Wed, Mar 23, 2005, Yedidyah Bar-David wrote about "Re: I must be missing > something": > > > Does this standard library exists on other OSs? > > > > As was already mentioned, the Windows Registry. > > As far as I know, there are few such attempts also in various Unices. > > Some of them even became semi-standard. E.g. nss, which is a library > > for accessing the user db, etc - but I do not even know how easy it > > is to add a new type for your own program. IIRC there are some more > > extensive ones, maybe in AIX or in MaxOS X, but I do not know that > > for sure.
NSS is something different. It is an abstract interface for accessing various data types. The data types remain flat and simple, but you can easily provide a different source for them. Thus you can easily add (at runtime) support for using the hosts data from NIS, the passwd data from LDAP and the shadow data from a local file (why? because you can). > > One major difference in philosophy between the Windows registry and the > Unix /etc is that the former was never ever meant to be manually read > or modified by users, and the latter was mainly intended for manual > modification. > > And, if you insist on going the Registry way, why repeat Microsoft's > mistake and create a second heirarchy of data with its own tools to > modify it, when a heirarchy of data already exists - the file system? > One of the things that ReiserFS tried to promote, for example, was that > 10 byte files should be ok. You can have /etc/X11/xterm/color/cursor > with the value "black", and you don't need a special database file, > registry file, XML file, or whatever. > Then you should take a look at http://elektra.sf.net/ , because this is basically how it is designed. -- Tzafrir Cohen | New signature for new address and | VIM is http://tzafrir.org.il | new homepage | a Mutt's [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | best ICQ# 16849755 | Space reserved for other protocols | friend ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
