Post #126,944
11/20/03 8:31:52 PM
11/20/03 8:32:23 PM
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Registry mostly useless
Anyone would agree that Acrobat (the full application) is as complex a Windows application as you will find. Well, after parallel-installing Windows 2000 to Windows 98 (same disk, different Windows directory), I said to myself "Self, what will happen if instead of reinstalling, I just go to the common location \\Program Files\\Adobe\\Acrobat and double-click on the EXE?"
Answer - it ran perfectly. It made its own registry entries as needed. Same with Distiller. We don't need no steenkin' installs.
Could a more fundamental condemnation of the registry be imagined? It's just binary bullshit. In fact I can't really imagine what all that manure in the registry is doing. It's basically a 20 megabyte cookie.
-drl
Edited by deSitter
Nov. 20, 2003, 08:32:23 PM EST
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Post #126,957
11/20/03 9:31:00 PM
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Registries
There are points to a registry type of thing, but the Registry in Windows has one killer flaw; it's the only egg in the basket.
In Warp, the 'registries' are called ini files. There are two main system ones: os2.ini and os2sys.ini. However, an application is free to create and use its own ini file, so you can have your application use \\myprog\\myprog.ini if it needs those kinds of facilities. This is good practice because a program won't fsck up the system inis if something bad happens while it's accessing its ini file, and because you can keep the ini file sizes manageable; instead of a 20 MB file in ram all the time, there's an 800K file and a 1.2 MB file (those are the sizes of os2sys.ini and os2.ini on my system right now), and prolly several MBs of other ini files that are loaded when needed, and flushed out of memory when no longer required. It might slow startup down a bit (after all, the ini file has to be loaded into memory, then actually read), but it has payoffs in more efficient use of memory.
The one big advantage that the registry has over ini files is that the ini files are flat; there's only one level of app:key-value, instead of being able to nest them.
--\n-------------------------------------------------------------------\n* Jack Troughton jake at consultron.ca *\n* [link|http://consultron.ca|http://consultron.ca] [link|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca] *\n* Kingston Ontario Canada [link|news://news.consultron.ca|news://news.consultron.ca] *\n-------------------------------------------------------------------
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Post #126,965
11/20/03 10:08:11 PM
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Typical of good windows programs
Such behavior is typical of good windows programs. So many programs mess up the registry that programs are forced to check and update the registry whenever they start. Some programs just about run their install routines every time they are started.
The registry is ultimatly a failure becuase MS didn't think it through all the way. They didn't worry about what would happen when multiple applications from multiple companies shared the registry. They didn't lay out sensible guide lines to keep applications from stepping on each other or the system.
Jay
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Post #126,967
11/20/03 10:19:13 PM
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The MS Yukon solution
seems to be to make the whole file system a giant registry (i.e. SQLServer).
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Post #126,989
11/21/03 7:22:38 AM
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That is, if not an LRPDism, at least a slogan...
...that deserves to be used any time we discuss technology with any prospective future-Windows-user of our acquaintance.
[link|mailto:MyUserId@MyISP.CountryCode|Christian R. Conrad]
(I live in Finland, and my e-mail in-box is at the Saunalahti company.)
Resident [link|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=119792|zIWETHEY pilkunnussija]
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Post #127,078
11/21/03 11:55:40 AM
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Registry was introduced for OLE 1.0
It was the place where OLE controls "registered" themselves, to announce that they were available to all potential users. The binary aspect of it may have been the optimization for really slow and small machines of that time (think Win 3.1).
Then came the push to store everything in the Registry. And the pain started.
Any advanced environment needs a place where common things can be found. Gnome is reinventing it. I am pretty sure you can find it in KDE too, although I don't know for sure.
Acrobat does not need to announce its own availabilty to anything. At most, when you started it, it had to reestablish file extension associations. But that is done anyway, nowadays, because people steal them left and right.
--
The rich, as usual, are employing the elected.
-- [link|http://unfit2print.blogspot.com/|http://unfit2print.blogspot.com/]
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Post #127,093
11/21/03 12:21:46 PM
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I remember that
Windows 3.1 had a regedit that was not iconized in the install. KDE has no registry - but it does have a rain forest of files under /opt/kde3, and it replicates about a Bolivia worth of them for every new user, in his $HOME. \n[voyager] drossl 2: ~> sudo du -s /opt/kde3\nPassword:\n604500 /opt/kde3\n[voyager] drossl 3: ~> sudo find /opt/kde3 | wc\n 39238 39287 2284965\n[voyager] drossl 4: ~>\n Jeezus H! 600Mb in 40 freakin' thousand files!! -drl
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Post #127,131
11/21/03 4:53:38 PM
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Hate to tell you this
but I did the same thing with Windows 98SE and XP Pro and ended up removing XP Pro and reinstalling 98 updates. Both OSes will share system files on "C:\\Program Files\\Common Files" directory and you will have a bad mix there.
Install to different partitions and the OSes will be happy with each other.
"Lady I only speak two languages, English and Bad English!" - Corbin Dallas "The Fifth Element"
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Post #127,170
11/21/03 7:42:52 PM
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Re: Hate to tell you this
Not an issue with 2k and 2000 - it shouldn't be one with XP and 98 either - are you sure that's what happened? If XP won't boot it's most likely a missing ntoskrnl.exe or ntldr. I think XP does funnies with ntldr.
-drl
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