I just *had* to comment.

[warlord at MIT.EDU (Derek Atkins)]

~/.* 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.

So, I guess ~/.* would work if you could set the application to read
its global configuration at install-time.

-derek

dsr at tao.merseine.nu writes:

> Oh, it's not *the* stupidest thing. But there is a much better
> system available that only needs a little standardization to
> work extremely well.
>
> I refer to, of course, the ~/.* system. If there were a library
> system much like GNU's getopts which dealt with reading and
> writing dotfiles in a standard syntax, we would have every
> advantage of a registry without any of the disadvantages.
>
> -dsr-
>
>
> -- 
> If they want to install software with "one click", they should install
> a word processor.  Installing a mail server without understanding can
> cause problems for the rest of the world, and so requires a little more
> responsibility.					  - Charles Cazabon
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-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available