.info ... was it so much a good idea?

[Belial6]

Trying to work outside the perimeters of the OS is not a valid complaint of it being broken.

Absolutly.

.info files do exist in Windows.  They are shortcut (.lnk) files.

In the 80's, people were figuring things out, and had to work with limited resources.  Today, there is really no reason not to take the best of all worlds.  Today, an OS should first check for a .info/.lnk file to see if there is a file specific configuration, and if it doesn't find one, it should check the inside the file for a filetype to decide what to use to open it, and failing that, should drop down to using the file extension.

While that would have been a huge burden to the hardware of the 80's, in today's hardware, it would be trivial.

[Belial6]

The implementation of .lnk and .info might be a little different, but unless the .info files do something different than what I remember, the functionality is basically the same.  As far as I remember of .info files, they give you an icon on the screen that launches another file.

Is that not what an .info file is for?

[Belial6]

Yeah, so they are basicly the same thing.  A .info file is basically a shortcut.

[Belial6]

The registry is actually a good idea implemented poorely.  It could easily be fixed.  All MS would need to do is have a batch import/export so that all settings are edited and preserved in local human readable configuration files.  This makes maintaining configurations easier.

Using a database for running is more efficent from an execution standpoint, so a simple command could verify and rebuild the registry from the configuration files.

Windows runs an indexer anyway, so it could even keep it's database up to date in near real time.