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Comment by bzxcvbn | Hacker News Reader

> This is a far cry from /etc/progname.conf in Linux.

Some of these arguments are not really in good faith. First, this isn't a technical issue with the registry, but with how it's been used over the years and never "refactored" - a distinct issue. Second, I dare you to run "ls /etc" and claim it's not a mess...

Besides, most of the post is how anyone with a text editor and admin rights can bork/hack the machine. As if someone with admin rights couldn't bork/hack the machine in a billion ways. Or if someone with admin rights on linux couldn't write garbage to /dev/sda1 and "hide" something from the OS.

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I mean, yeah - /etc is messy. Every configuration file in /etc has yet another bespoke configuration language. And somewhere on your system lies a corresponding buggy, half implemented parser for it.

But /etc has gotten messy in the same way a desk gets messy. There's documents everywhere, but if you pick anything up and take a look at it, you can usually (with the help of google) figure out what that file does and how you can change it. It helps that almost every file in /etc is owned by a single program or library. And just about all of those programs have documentation. (Or, at worst, source code).

In comparison, the windows registry feels like an old, disorganized community's storage space. On first glance things look organized, but actually there's been dozens of half hearted attempts to organize everything over the years by different people, each with their own idea of where everything should go. You don't recognise half the stuff in there. Random ex-employees have been dumping random objects in there for years. But its impossible to tell at a glance what random objects are critically important, and what is trash. Everyone else has this problem too, so nobody throws anything out, and its just accreted.

Braver people than you have fallen on their swords trying to tame the windows registry. There be dragons.

I'd take /etc over the windows registry any day of the week. /etc is messy at the surface level. The windows registry is messy like a fractal.

> . And just about all of those programs have documentation. (Or, at worst, source code).

Having a documentation has nothing with reg/etc, win/nix or whatever.

You have documentation for something in /etc? 99% that came from the distro packages.

I love editing files in /etc ending in conf! Some are pseudo-INI (OpenSSL), some are pseudo-XML (Apache2 and friends), some are some kind of unholy amalgamation between C and YAML (nginx, dhcp daemons), others are some kind of TOML derivative (systemd, NetworkManager) and there's also some diet JSON in there! Netplan uses YAML, of course, though JSON will probably also parse. It's always a fun adventure to reverse engineer these file formats.

Of course, most important files contain whitespace separated lines of configuration of which the meaning is only clear if you read the comments above it (cron, fstab, crypttab) or secretly bash scripts (GRUB config and many other files in /etc/default).

Then there's user configuration stuff. Sure, HKLM vs HKCU is kind of weird, but the user configuration structure in the Linux home directory is an argument against intelligent design. ~/.config, ~/.programname, ~/.local or ~/snap/<name>/current/<randomfile>? Roll the dice and find out! You may be able to find the setting you're looking for in the DConf Editor but if you can't find it there, grep and prayer is your best bet.

The Windows registry may be the result of a flawed execution, but I'll take it over the mess in Linux any day. Sadly, the registry has fallen out of fashion in Windows so now managing random configuration files somewhere in %USERPROFILE% (if you're lucky and the programmer hasn't hardcoded C:\Users\<username> as a path) just like on Linux. By the way, who needs the "hidden" FS flag anyway? Just start the filename with a period and pretend the ls-bug-dressed-up-as-a-feature for hiding files and folders is a standard every platform sticks to!

> I love editing files in /etc ending in conf! Some are pseudo-INI (OpenSSL), some are pseudo-XML (Apache2 and friends), some are some kind of unholy amalgamation between C and YAML (nginx, dhcp daemons), others are some kind of TOML derivative (systemd, NetworkManager) and there's also some diet JSON in there! Netplan uses YAML, of course, though JSON will probably also parse. It's always a fun adventure to reverse engineer these file formats.

Sure it would be great if all configuration was written in a single configuration format. Life would also be so much easier if there was only one ultimate programming language so we would only have to learn one. Unfortunately reality is messy and for a variety of reasons we have different formats. As a side note, I don't think I ever ran into a syntax error for a system configuration file, because I couldn't figure out the format. The first time that happened to me was when editing a yaml file for CI.

> Of course, most important files contain whitespace separated lines of configuration of which the meaning is only clear if you read the comments above it (cron, fstab, crypttab) or secretly bash scripts (GRUB config and many other files in /etc/default).

Well there is "man fstab", "man 5 cron" etc., so the file formats and options are formatted. However the complaint that the default files are so well commented that one understands what the different options are without actually reading the docs is just weird to me. How is that worse than some random registry key that is not documented anywhere without comments (they are not possible AFAIK) and without knowing what type they should take.

> Then there's user configuration stuff. Sure, HKLM vs HKCU is kind of weird, but the user configuration structure in the Linux home directory is an argument against intelligent design. ~/.config, ~/.programname, ~/.local or ~/snap/<name>/current/<randomfile>?

Which program saves configuration inside ~.local? I'm not aware of any and they generally should not. Also adding adding snap to that list is a bit besides the point, I don't think containers typically save their configuration in the registry either?

> Roll the dice and find out! You may be able to find the setting you're looking for in the DConf Editor but if you can't find it there, grep and prayer is your best bet.

I actually dislike that gnome uses dconf (which is a better organised registry), I think it would be better if they instead would have text files as well. I understand it's largely for performance reasons.

> The Windows registry may be the result of a flawed execution, but I'll take it over the mess in Linux any day.

So how do you know what registry keys to change to achieve a certain configuration (without documentation, because you didn't like that on Linux either)?

> Sadly, the registry has fallen out of fashion in Windows so now managing random configuration files somewhere in %USERPROFILE% (if you're lucky and the programmer hasn't hardcoded C:\Users\<username> as a path) just like on Linux. By the way, who needs the "hidden" FS flag anyway? Just start the filename with a period and pretend the ls-bug-dressed-up-as-a-feature for hiding files and folders is a standard every platform sticks to!

> Sure it would be great if all configuration was written in a single configuration format.

I think the root cause is there is and was no readily available system standard/interface. I would claim that the majority of the files are doing boring things and could have, and would have, been made in some standard format, and possibly placed in some standard organization, if a system standard had existed. Or, perhaps I've too heavily discounting the desire for nerds to create something new, even when reasonable, but not perfect, alternatives already exist.

Systemd showed me how homogenization and standards are generally disliked, when it comes to things around configuration files, even if there's absolutely massive utility.

> As a side note, I don't think I ever ran into a syntax error for a system configuration file, because I couldn't figure out the format

I remember struggling to get some open source VPN package to work right. I swear I've read through the manuals three or four times but it just wouldn't work and the error messages were meaningless. I know most of the obscure formats now out of experience, but it's still not great. DNS BIND configuration and zones (and the accompanying AppArmor configuration) also caused me more trouble than necessary. Configuring and debugging inetd configuration was also something I never hope to do again.

> Well there is "man fstab", "man 5 cron" etc

Of course there is, but those aren't exactly light reading. It's not that the formats are difficult to find, it's that there's no consistency to the formats themselves with nameless columns that you need to figure out by reading several paragraphs of text.

> Which program saves configuration inside ~.local? I'm not aware of any and they generally should not. Also adding adding snap to that list is a bit besides the point, I don't think containers typically save their configuration in the registry either?

In my ~/.local/etc I see fish and bash_completion.d, for example. I don't know what programs created those, but they're there. I see some PipeWire files in ~/.local/state. ~/.local/share contains many files ending in ".conf" (most of them Flatpak, but also Kodi and GnuPG). I prefer them stuffing their config in .local rather than ignoring XDG, though. IMO Snap fits the list perfectly because it's not sold as "containers", it's sold as an "app store" even though it's focused on GUI containers. And I'm still mad about Snap not even bothering to use a capital letter in their home directory name.

I like dconf in that most settings are actually documented in context. They're searchable, use a standard format, and have structure. The ability to distinguish default values from custom settings is also very nice. IMO it's the Windows Registry but with a good editor and an even worse API.

> So how do you know what registry keys to change to achieve a certain configuration

Most of the time, I can use the find tool to find exactly what I need in the registry. I barely need to touch it anyway since most Windows settings are configurable from the GUI. Sure, it's certainly not the best config management system, but it's design is much better than the hodgepodge of configuration files unrelated systems use.

I admit that on disk, the Windows registry format is atrocious. However, the concept of a single, unified, backuppable, remotely manageable configuration system is just much better than "let's stuff some files in /etc and let people find out by making them go through our docs". I don't know where to look for config files on Linux, on most Windows tools I at least know what program I need to open to edit the configuration. I'd like DConf or at least XDG to get used more often because IMO the Linux ecosystem is the worst of two options.

> some kind of TOML derivative (systemd, NetworkManager)

A bit off-topic, but it's funny to me that you identified these as a "TOML derivative", when both of the mentioned pieces of software predate TOML. Systemd uses D-Bus's flavor of INI. IDK if NetworkManager uses exactly that same flavor or not, but it's pretty similar at least.

Fair enough! I don't know the exact formats and their history, all of that was developed long before I started really using Linux.

Either way, when I edited the files for the first time, it's like "oh, it's like TOML but...". They're not necessarily bad, though nesting of configuration groups isn't always as obvious. I suppose these are part of the evolution of Linux config file design!

> Some of these arguments are not really in good faith. First, this isn't a technical issue with the registry, but with how it's been used over the years and never "refactored" - a distinct issue. Second, I dare you to run "ls /etc" and claim it's not a mess...

I'd suggest that last bit is not uttered in good faith.

20+ years ago you could install the Microsoft Office suite on the Microsoft OS du jour and you'd find about 12k new registry entries.

You could then uninstall that same Microsoft Office suite from your OS, and ... you'd find no decrease in the size of your registry.

In the same epoch -- if you installed a hundred new applications on your Debian GNU/Linux OS, you may end up with several dozen new directory hierarchies under your /etc directory. If you then uninstalled those applications, the /etc/ entries would be gone. If they weren't, you'd file a report on the Debian BTS and that oversight would be resolved within a few months.

For this reason I think it's disingenuous to claim running ls /etc/ is a mess that's equivalent, in any sense of the word, to the microsoft registry.

I'm sure MS has enough issues with backwards compatibility. Can't imagine handling multiple registry implementations on top of it.

If your argument relies on how things were in late 90s - early 00s, I don't know if it's really worth anything today.

That's probably a reasonable retort.

My response was to the claims that we aren't addressing the technical issues with the registry -- that is, if Microsoft was unable/unwilling to handle registry hygiene, what hope the rest of us? I have not run the same test on a modern OS / Office install and uninstall, but at the risk of exposing my biases, I'm not hugely optimistic.

Tangential aside - at the time I was working with a large Australian telco where we'd developed a SOE with robust roaming plus (effectively) package management for ~1500 desktop applications on a Microsoft Windows 3.x platform, all of which was largely kiboshed by the introduction of the registry.

Secondly, I feel I've already addressed your 'at least it's not as bad as the /etc mess' by pointing out that /etc is not a mess on some, perhaps all, GNU/Linux distros with a good package management system.

To paraphrase - if your argument relies on how slackware handled /etc in the late 90's, I don't know if that's worth anything today.

> Second, I dare you to run "ls /etc" and claim it's not a mess...

In principle, sure. But in practice, using /etc to edit configuration data is not that hard, and every Linux user does it all the time. Different software uses different configuration formats, sure (though it's worth nothing that NixOS is doing really clever things to solve that problem), but it's really not that hard or scary.

Manually editing the registry though... That way lies madness. It's much scarier and it's much more fragile.

> Manually editing the registry though... That way lies madness. It's much scarier and it's much more fragile.

How... exactly? There's no way to create a syntax error as trivial as you can in config files. How is using regedit or powershell commands more fragile (I understand "scarier" in a way everything you're not used to is scary).

Well the article points to a way of preventing following entries to be read by having an entry in non alphabetical order. But how often have you ran into syntax errors for system configuration files in Linux? I can't say that this has been much of an issue in my experience.

Start making raw edits directly to an ext4 disk rather than using published libs/APIs, and you'll soon find some new horrors to be scared about.

That's because the article is about doing binary edits to to the registry files themselves, something no application or user should ever do. Instead changes should be done through the API or the regedit program.

> Second, I dare you to run "ls /etc" and claim it's not a mess...

In unix man my.conf will work for most sane programs.

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