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Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

I don't see why a strongly typed binary blob is worse than a mess of untyped randomly formatted configuration files.

There might be an argument to be made but it's clearly not unambiguously wrong.

Here is a reason: You can view the configuration files and logs of a damaged system by mounting its disk in another system and using any old text editor. There is no need to install special tools.

I agree that's the advantage of text formats. Just as that's the advantage of text networking protocols over binary protocols (you can read them with wireshark or even use telnet).

But you have to weigh that advantage over other advantages. If it was this simple, every database (and we are talking about a database here) would just be text to make recovery easier.

I agree that you have to weigh the advantages, but we are talking about a special type of database. Most configuration data is read-only during normal operation. It's not as if anyone stores customer data in /etc or the Windows registry.

'regedit' is not a special tool on windows. It's in every install of windows and you can use it open any registry file.

Sure, but what if my only Windows system won't boot? I am sure that I can access the registry from a Linux system somehow, but it's not as easy as invoking less or vim. That is especially true if the Linux system doesn't have a GUI. I don't need a GUI to read a text file.

Strongly typed as long as your type is one of this very short list: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb7...

In practice, almost everything is binary, string or DWORD.

The world would have been a very different place if the registy had supported comment fields and/or online help.

diff

You can diff registry files and any subtree. You could diff the entire system if you wanted to. Yes, you do have to export to files but you still get one consistent format no matter how deep you want to go.

because when something gets corrupted, the damage is limited.

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