This at first read sounds like a candidate for stupid question of the year. But on reconsidering, maybe windows did something right by consolidating all those *.conf files scattered all over hell into one file
I can't disagree more strongly with that if I tried.
Sure it may be a slight pain to have a large number of conf files in /etc, but when the registry gets damaged under Windows, that's it - you're knackered.
Note that the registry is not a single file. It's several files, and each user has his own "current user" hive, not unlike the way each Linux user has dot files in his home directory.
The registry is sort of like a filesystem, with a similar hierarchical structure. The hierarchy is reasonably laid out, and one can usually find what one needs in it as rapidly as one can find equivalent settings in the Linux /etc and home dotfile trees. In fact, I'd say that /etc is rather chaotic and organic and could use some of the structure one currently finds in Window's HKLM and HKR hives.
The registry's real problem is that it's *not* a filesystem, so one needs very specialized tools to manipulate it. The Unix philosophy is that everything is a file, and that means that any tool that understands files abstractly can manipulate virtually any Unix object. I feel crippled using the Windows registry because I can't do the same with it.
One of the features of the Reiser filesystem is that it handles very small files efficiently. It would be a great way to implement a registry, and I believe it was targeted at the problem of storing Gnome's many small settings in tiny files without wasting lots of space.
