On Wed, 29 Mar 2006, Bill Crawford wrote:
There are plenty of reasons why it hasn't happened, among which
are a number
of experiments with various forms of "registry" ...
Please let's avoid biases centered around an unnamed company implementation.
To be simple I am an advocate of ANY on disk, plain text enabled,
configuration standard that is designed and modeled after a traditional
unix file system.
The reason most applications use individual config files instead of a central
repository is because that makes it much, *much* easier to:
1. Design a domain-specific config language. XML does *NOT* solve this
problem; it is a *lexical* (meta)language. The structure goes on top.
2. Point to a different config file when you start a program.
3. Copy config files, rename them, reuse them, move them into chroot()
environments, and generally be *free* to do so.
I fail to see how any of the above important considerations are limited in
any way.
Ah. The "it must all be integrated" straw man. (sigh)
There is no straw man, real advantages and features become available when
configuration data is unified.
Shane.