[plug] Registry info

[Oliver White]

Afterthoughts...

I've been thinking about Jamie Zawinski's (sp?) comments on GNU/Linux.
He made the point that linux sucks, it just sucks less than the rest.
His main gripe was that the operating system required it's users to be
system administrators. I'm a programmer myself, and thus a 'power user',
but I'm certainly not a system administrator. Anything that would make
admin easier would be desirable.

Appart from the technical issues (for instance, the registry would have
to be able to be rebuilt automagicaly should corruption occur), there is
a definite community issue that needs to be addressed.

The delegate and conquor approach that linux uses may be a hinderance in
pulling together the community around a new OS standard, no matter how
brilliant it is. Whilst linus is in charge of the kernel, on the whole
our operating system's development is entirely decentralised. I wonder
how we would going about building a system for which support could be
implemented incrementaly as each component came into line. We're all
quite familiar with the painful progress from libc to glibc, and the
stuborness of some distributions to change, but I'm also of the view
that Linux truely needs to evolve, and compatibility will suffer at
certain points in development where adaptation won over as a greater
priority.

My $0.022. :-)

Tom Atkinson wrote:
> 
> Oliver,
> 
> The biggest thing about such a scheme, and the reason it is important
> for Unix/Linux, is that it makes administration of the system
> considerably easier.

--
Oliver White