You could put this information in a central system configuration file (let's say, /etc/mime-types), but if you do that, any newly installed software would need root access just to register itself. Example: the registry holds the names associated with file extensions along with the apps that should be used to open them. The other thing the registry does is system interaction configuration. Doing app settings this way seems much smarter. To have the implementation be that bad on top of all the other problems is really quite bad.Īctually, the registry is more than just app settings (that problem is solved on linux with /etc/* and ~/.* usually, and on OSX using (X)/Library/Preferences, where X is anything from /System to ~. But the Windows registry conflates these two ideas in a way that seems, in retrospect, obviously stupid. I certainly think centralized system settings are a good idea for an OS, and an OS or application framework should provide an easy way to handle per-app settings.

Let's use a bunch of horrible cryptic ABBRVD_ALL_CAPS_AND_UNDERSCORES names for the folders just to make it less friendly. Let's not have any conventions that would let us elide settings for physical paths to things (as Jeff observed). Let's use human-unreadable/writable GUIDs to emulate pointers inside what is really a 60's-style hierarchical database.

Let's encourage applications to stick their data in the same hairy, fragile binary file as all of our extremely important system configuration data. Let's make the system store all of its relevent configuration in a hairy, fragile binary format. I think the real problems with the Windows registry are typical of Microsoft's over-engineering/under-thinking paradigm: You get a nice private space for your app's settings in a format that's both reasonably expressive (nested dictionaries or lists of strings, integers, reals and boolean values) and human readable/modifiable (because it's XML).

Applications have their own settings in XML property lists stored in a common place in the user's home directory. I think the correct evolution of this idea is really exhibited by Mac OS X.

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