Comment by EvanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EvanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

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Please don't use INI files. The registry is infinitely more manageable for sysadmins than INI files. I hate it when your app makes me write scripts to manage settings versus just using the built-in tooling in Group Policy for dealing with the registry. (Yes, yes-- there is tooling in Group Policy Preferences for dealing with INI files. It fails spectacularly on malformed INI files. It has never been reliable in my experience.)

The idea of a centralized grammatically-accessible configuration store was a good idea (albeit this isn't want the registry was "for" originally-- it was just a file-type registry originally). GConf was a similar idea.

Devs misusing the registry to store opaque binary values (especially gigantic ones), accessing it with too high a velocity, and having a less-than-stellar file format have hurt it, for sure. Having few good schema rules or APIs that limited arbitrary developer access didn't help either.

Okay, so that's the sysadmin perspective. Tell me about the user perspective.

Then, we should talk about, when they are in conflict, which one comes first.

A dev is going to include UI to manage the settings if non-technical users are expected to modify them. Whether those settings go in an INI or the registry doesn't matter at all for that UI.

Having said, that level of technical skill req'd to edit an INI or the registry is about the same. Either way you're talking about a non-technical user descending thru a hierarchy of strange-to-them named containers to get to an arcane-looking location where settings are saved.

The user is going to call me when they have problems. It's easier for everybody if I can just administer the software centrally so they don't have problems to begin with.

How is the registry going to make that administration any easier? The registry is its own micro cosmos, doesn't matter if some setting is in an INI file somewhere on the filesystem or somewhere in the registry

Sysadmins have great tooling to deal with the registry (Group Policy, Local Group Policy for non-domain machines). The tooling for INI files isn't very good.

I don't know one sysadmin that likes how the registry does things. INI files for configuration are vastly easier to understand and edit. Use the registry for permissions and keep your tooling.

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