RE: XWin design suggestion

["Ralf Habacker" <Ralf dot Habacker at freenet dot de>]

> > The big problem I
> > have with the registry is the deployment problem.  When I get a new
> > workstation/laptop/whatever (this is actually a pretty common occurrence for
> > me), I've already got a zillion apps that need to be installed because they
> > munge the registry.  I'd rather they all use configuration files.  Then I
> > could simply copy their respective directories, my home directory, and be
> > done with it.
>
> At work I'm working on a program which I now enhanced with "Never show this
> dialog again" and "Remember what i do now and do this the next time on your
> own" dialogs. The settings are stored in the registry. It's easy, simple
> and no one dies if he starts the program on a new computer where these
> dialogs popup again.
> If those preset values are stored in a file, you could simply copy the file.
> But the implementation would have been a zillion times more difficult and
> (IMO) less robust.

One of the major disadvantage of windows applications I have seen, is that there
is no easy way to copy an application with all the hidden stuff like registry
settings and so on from one machine to another.

But there seems to be a simple way to do this by adding two command line options
or menu entries. One for exporting all the hidden configuration into a flat file
and one for importing such a config file. Why not adding such options to the
XWin server and or other applications ?

The export/importfile could be build of lines with name=value settings or
something else easy one, which wasn't complicated to parse.

Cheers
Ralf