> Oh yeah, that reminds me, you'd also need to handle subscribing to registry update notifications in this flat-file 'who needs anything other than text files' fantasy.
> Again, just because you don't grok the problem space doesn't mean its empty.
has numerous problems as an API and is fiddly and requires every app that wants to listen to do this correctly.
Look. Yes you can hack together the registry using flat files, using FS notifications, using the insane transactional FS apis, magically working out how to handle concurrent writes etc and have every process that wants to interact with it implement this correctly.
But why. In every sense it is less clean, more complex and generally worse. Wasn't the idea to make it better and cleaner?
Case in point: inotify.