[Python-Dev] Winreg update (original) (raw)

Neil Hodgson nhodgson@bigpond.net.au
Sat, 12 Aug 2000 14:16:54 +1000

.... It also seems that there are a lot of people (let's call them "back seat coders") who have vague ideas of what they want but don't want to spend a bunch of time in a long discussion about registry arcana. Therefore I am endevouring to make it as easy and fast to contribute to the discussion as possible.

I think a lot of the registry using people are unwilling to spend too much energy on this because, while it looks useless, its not really going to be a problem so long as the low level module is available.

If you're one of the people who has asked for winreg in the core then you should respond. It isn't (IMO) sufficient to put in a hacky API to make your life easier. You need to give something to get something. You want windows registry support in the core -- fine, let's do it properly.

Hacky API only please.

The registry is just not important enough to have this much attention or work.

All you need to do is read this email and comment on whether you agree with the overall principle and then give your opinion on fifteen possibly controversial issues. The "overall principle" is to steal shamelessly from Microsoft's new C#/VB/OLE/Active-X/CRL API instead of innovating for Python. That allows us to avoid starting the debate from scratch. It also eliminates the feature that Mark complained about (which was a Python-specific innovation).

The Microsoft.Win32.Registry* API appears to be a hacky legacy API to me. Its there for compatibility during the transition to the System.Configuration API. Read the blurb for ConfigManager to understand the features of System.Configuration. Its all based on XML files. What a surprise.

Neil