I just *had* to comment.

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Derek Atkins writes:
| ~/.* is not sufficient to deal with "global settings".  However a
| registry isn't sufficient, either.  Think distributed systems (i.e.,
| I've got 1000 machines and the software is installed on a central file
| server (not on each machine) and run out of the network file system).
| Registries of all forms fall flat in the face of distributed file
| systems, unless there is some standard way to read the global registry
| info out of the file system.

Now if the registry were handled by a server that used TCP or UDP for
access, it would be straightforward to have a shared net registry.  I
wonder if the sourceforge registry project is considering  this.   If
not, maybe you should send them a suggestion.

This could get complicated, since such a central registry could  well
be a bottleneck. Then you'd want to add mirroring and a way to find a
server with good response time.