linux registry (no, not that again!)

[Michael A. Peters]

On 11/03/2004 03:11:01 AM, Iago Rubio wrote:

> 
> Again, I will advocate to avoid central failure points for the whole
> system, just for the shake of "it will be great for newbies".
> 
> ITOH hiveconf scares me less than the Linux Registry does.

Elektra does not provide a central failure point for the system.
In case you are not aware, elektra does not use a single file registry  
- it uses a file for each key/value pair.

[mpeters at devel ~]$ ls -l /etc/kdb/system/init/ |head -5
total 80
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 Oct 23 05:27 1
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 Oct 23 05:27 2
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 Oct 23 05:27 3
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 Oct 23 05:27 4
[mpeters at devel ~]$ ls -l /etc/kdb/system/init/1/ |head -5
total 12
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 23 Oct 23 05:27 action
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 35 Oct 23 05:27 process
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 20 Oct 23 05:27 runlevels
[mpeters at devel ~]$ cat /etc/kdb/system/init/1/action
RG002
40
<DATA>
respawn

This produces no more of a SPF than already exists.
With respect to the library that C programs (or others) use to access  
data -

[mpeters at devel ~]$ ldd /lib/libkdb.so
        libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0x00b16000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x00afd000)
[mpeters at devel ~]$

Very light - unless libc or the library itself being broken, you don't  
have a SPF there either - but if /lib gets messed up, you have to boot  
from alternative media anyway. And if your c library is messed up, well ...

-=-

I get the feeling that many people are turned off to Elektra just  
because they have had a bad experience with a particular implementation  
of a registry in an operating system that shall remain nameless.

Before you just blindly reject what is a good thing, log into gnome,  
and launch an application called gconf-editor.

There you have it - a registry in use in Linux that has been in use in  
Linux for quite some time quite succesfully. gconf isn't quite as  
robust as elektra because it uses a daemon which does present a single  
point of failure, but it is a registry.