Karsten M. Self wrote:
on Mon, May 24, 2004 at 10:09:13AM +0100, Randy Orrison (randy@orrison.com) wrote:Roberto Sanchez wrote:Karsten M. Self wrote:[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\System] "LocalProfile"=dword:00000001My only question is this: is this key documented somewhere, and how would one ordinarially go about getting documentation on a registry key?Probably not documented. I doubt MS would want people to know too much about the registry. [...] That is one of the reasons I laugh at people who complain about the lack of documentation for free software.As with most documentation, free and proprietary, it's easy to find if you know in advance what you're looking for. Going to www.microsoft.com and entering "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE Policies LocalProfile" into the search box on the front page returns two hits, different pages with the same content.
[snip]
In the Free Software world, the answer would be a manpage that documents either the entire file structure, or the relevant subtree of a shared structure. Of course, with GNOME rushing madly into fatal embrace of the Registry, *and* abhorring manpages, all bets are off. But we'll file our bugreports here in Debian land.
[1]
But, say, for an application or suite which owned a particular subkey, I'd expect to see:
[2]
- A full listing of keys. - Values. - Behaviors. Anything less would be a documentation bug.
But you still need to know what you're looking for. In this case, using the Microsoft reg key as an example, and assuming wonderful Free Software documentation as you describe, you'd still need to know that the relevant subkey is owned by "policies" rather than "login" or "profile" or "active directory" or whatever, and that the setting you're looking for is a local profile setting, even though the problem manifests itself as a failure in roaming profiles.
Hmmm... Not sure where I'm going with this. I guess I'm just trying to defend Microsoft from Roberto's implications that they would intentionally leave things undocumented[3], and that free software documentation is better than Microsoft's. As an often frustrated user of both Microsoft and open software, I feel qualified to say that all documentation sucks, and Microsoft in this particular instance doesn't suck any worse than any other.
Randy[1] This is why I'm moving as much as possible and practical from Windows to OSS, because OSS is so much more ... open!
[2] I'm not so confident that I'd say I expected to see it, but I'd certainly _like_ to see it. What I'd expect would be to be able to file a bug report, and be able to dig through the source to figure it out, and submit a contribution that would likely be accepted with thanks. (See [1])
[3] Yes, I know -- they have and they do. But not in this case, and not about in the registry in general. I've found that most every registry key I've been curious about I've been able to find either from google (there are many third-party registry documentation sites) or microsoft.com. Of course, you need to know what the key is first, to find it.