I just *had* to comment.

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

David Kramer writes:
| On Wednesday 02 June 2004 11:52 am, John Chambers wrote:
| > 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.
|
| The correct way to spell that is "LDAP".

Yeah; I'd thought of mentioning that. ;-)

The main problem there is that I've tried using LDAP a few times, and
it's  a nightmare.  I just can't afford the years of study that would
be required to learn to use it.  And it doesn't help that when I  ask
questions, the usual response is of the form "RTFM, idiot!" This does
not encourage dummies like me to continue.

This says nothing about LDAP itself, of course; it's a comment on the
user community.  But the nature of a user community can have profound
effects on usability.  People have to be able to learn to use it,  or
they won't use it.

I'm sorta hoping that the sourceforge registry project will be a  bit
more  accessible to mere humans.  Their statement that they're mainly
aiming at handling simple name:value pairs is a Good Sign. This can't
handle  all  the  world's  config problems, true, but it can handle a
large portion of the problem space. I have a lot of apps whose config
files  are entirely of this form.  I typically write a config routine
that also accepts all the data from environ, too. A registry that can
save  name:value  pairs  in  a server that's reachable via TCP or UDP
would make it possible to do this sort of configuration for a set  of
processes running on a set of machines.

Making it actually usable by human programmers could be very useful.