Registry and settings

[Quigs]

Heres the summary of my idea...
the registry contains settings for everything, and everything that we generally want the user to change has to be in an applet of some sort..
My understanding of XML is that its sorta layered so that if we make the registry in it we could have at the top of each key the actual data / name..
and then in some other layer have whether it will be in a applet or not...
and how to let the user change the value and what text to appear with it

WHY?!?! Im thinking this would extremely simplify coding the control panel and every other config thing in ReactOS, It could simply autogenerate it based on the data in the registry!

yea...so this is based on my understanding of a lot of different things.

[Darklin]

Speaking as an outsider. The registry can grow to be HUGE! Ever looked through the registry of a system that hasn't been wiped for more than 6 months? It's crazy...

My point being, XML is an extremly verbose format. In addition, the parsing of an XML format file is generally fairly slow. With even an optimized parser on a 2MB or better XML file it can take upwards of 6 seconds to find a single entry.

I would be concerned that an XML format registry could potentially not only take up a large amount of disk space, which is a big negative for smaller/older systems. But every time the system needs to parse the registry for some value it could end up taking an inordinate amount of time.

Thoughts?

[Mrkaras]

I agree, XML would have advantages and be easy to read and use but would probably grow very big and slow quickely, the last thing we need is a regestry slower than windows. As far as file size, could an xml file be converted to a binery file (rather than a text file) saving signifacantly on file size or would that negate the purpose of being xml in the first place. I don't know how that would efect speed either.
Its probably a bit impractical to redesign the regestry now anyway.