In article <fo4ajp$kfp$1@gnus01.u.washington.edu>,
"Max Power" <mikehack@washington.edu> writes:
>
> Has any form of UNIX (ignoring POSTIX compliant OS's that have an internal
> structure unrelated to Linix / BSD / Mach / ... like OS2 / etc..) ever had
> any kind of registry (for the core OS, not the applications; system daemons
> may be tracked by such a structure -- but not user daemons)?
>
> The Apple OSX (but not really AIX) and RTOS variant QNX, as well as BEos are
> about the only substantial deviations from Unix in the modern era.
>
> Not a one has any kind of registry data structure that I am aware of.
>
> With respect to modern Plug and Play issues, and some aspects of booting
> up -- a very limited registry would have some utility. There may even be
> some IEEE or ACM papers on variants of Unix that have tried this. I am not
> suggesting the concept be applied to Unix (non Intel) workstations or
> minicomputers.
>
> I am not suggesting any design like anything in the Microsoft mold, just
> something to make storing and recovering (if necessary) core OS states more
> robust.


I don't know that I'd use the word "robust" to describe any sort of binary
database of system configuration properties, unless it is (a) possible and
(b) automatic to take a snapshot of it when significant changes are made,
so that recovery is possible if it gets hosed. Oh, and it would be real
nice if it were well documented, not only in structure but as to as many
of the entries in it as possible. (There may always be a few that you're
not _supposed_ to fool around with except when told to by the vendor, but
ideally those would not stick around forever, once they'd worked out a way
to Do The Right Thing both automatically and reliably.)

Having said that, AIX has something more like a registry than like
anything traditional to most flavors of Unix. And SMF on Solaris 10 and
later is starting to look like where most new dynamic configuration
options will end up eventually. The latter does at least snapshot itself
at significant times, and AFAIK can be manually dumped out in a textual
form (well, XML, anyway). Not familiar enough with AIX to comment in
detail on it, or on whatever snapshot or text-based dump capabilities it
may or may not have.

Incidentally, UNIX is a trademark nowadays rather than a code base, and as
such, OSs that have passed the compliance testing and whose vendors have
paid the fee, may be entitled to use the trademark even if they have
little or nothing to do with the historical code base. A whole lot of
programming and scripting interfaces are covered by the standard, but very
little to do with administration or configuration is (which gets into the
contentious history of trying to get agreement on standards).