[lug] more boot CD

[John Karns]

On Wed, 27 Jun 2001, John Hernandez said:

> I just need to rant a little about this.  Does anyone else find it
> absurd that (to this day) you can install a program on a Windows
> system that "conflicts" with another program and makes the whole OS go
> haywire?  Is this an artifact of having a shared registry
> architecture?
>
> Can you imagine someone saying, "Oh, on Linux, that version of mpg123
> doesn't get along with cdrecord and crashes your system!"
>
> Are there any clear advantages to the Windows way of managing software
> packages and the central registry?  It seems like uninstalls rarely do
> what you expect, and programs fight each other for control of
> variables, etc.

The advantages are primarily for MS and other software vendors, IMO.  I
believe that the idea of the binary registry was concocted to help hide
details of installation, after having had such details exposed for any
curious person who cared to peruse the plain ASCII system.ini and win.ini
files in the 3.x versions.

The registry does indeed accumulate a lot of cruft over time, and provides
yet another venue for 3rd party add-on OS software utilities to market
their products and ride the Windows gravy train.  I recently ran a
registry checking / cleanup program (shareware) on my laptop on a W98
installation after having the machine for two years.  I was amazed at how
much junk there was - about 450 dead links in a 5MB system.dat file - and
I run Linux on the machine about 70% of the time.

Perhaps the closest Linux counterpart is the RPM database?  Although I
haven't experienced a corrupted RPM db yet, it seems that most of the pkgs
that I DL from the 'net, I tend to go for the tar balled versions anyway.
I rely on the RPM db for maintaining the OS in regards to
interdependencies with the pkgs on the distro CD's.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
John Karns                                              jkarns at csd.net