All options and variables, persistent or not, should be documented and modifiable via plain-text files. ... I decided to keep a "master" file under SCCS control, and run

The desire to have all configuration aspects accessible in a single text-based way - which can make change control easier (something we've heard previously on toasters) and which can make it easier to implement management applications - is an explicit goal of the registry mechanism. The current implementation does not manage all configuration aspects, so a user interface to it is perhaps premature. We used it to implement a few features (automatically-persistent options, saving of DHCP info, easier creation of filerview screens, etc.) in the last few releases. But it's not quite ready to be the user-accessible-all-configuration-in-one-place mechanism, so there is no user interface to it, yet.

...Tim Thompson...Network Appliance, Inc...tjt@netapp.com...