[nycbug-talk] meeting update. . .

[Bob Ippolito]

On Oct 8, 2004, at 4:53 PM, Rick Aliwalas wrote:

> On Fri, 8 Oct 2004 matador-gtabug at matadorsplace.com wrote:
>
>> Someone ask Mr. Allman why sendmail.cf is so long/crazy ?
>
> As opposed to what, windows registry?  ;)
>
> You're not supposed to edit the cf file anyway - just the mc file.
> Don't believe the hype.  If I can manage to get sendmail working, it
> can't be all that bad...

There isn't really anything fundamentally wrong with the idea of a 
registry.. The fact that it's implemented as a single file database on 
Windows is kind of a pain, but actually working with key/value pairs in 
a standard way across ALL applications on the entire system isn't bad!  
If regedit displayed the information in a more useful way it would 
probably be much more acceptable.  It's certainly not hard at all to 
manipulate the registry with scripts written in a language like Python 
or Perl (both of which work quite well on Windows).

Mac OS X implements three vaguely similar systems, the 
SystemConfiguration database (designed for monitoring purposes.. stuff 
like the current network settings, battery level, and the airport 
signal strength go here), the NetInfo database (designed for more 
static local and domain configurations, basically like /etc), and the 
Preferences system (scattered amongst plist files in a few known 
locations: ~/Library/Preferences, /Library/Preferences, 
/Network/Library/Preferences, and /System/Library/Preferences, for 
configuring individual applications).  The advantages of the Mac OS X 
system is that it's easy to migrate or remove the settings that matter 
to users (because they are just plist files, and applications always 
know how to recreate them if they don't exist), the highly volatile 
data (SystemConfiguration) is designed for performance and can be 
monitored asynchronously, and the NetInfo database is designed like 
LDAP for the same uses as LDAP (it currently integrates with LDAP and 
might be replaced by LDAP in the future...).  Additionally, Mac OS X 
property lists support more data types (strings, numbers/booleans, 
dates, arrays, arbitrary data, and dictionaries) in a more consistent 
way than the Windows registry.

-bob