[Martijn]

What is the best way to modify the registry?
So far, I've seen manual modification, which is not very useful for non-technical people.
And I've seen shell scripts that use sed, which is not easy to undo during an uninstall.

So, I've been thinking (just of the top of my head):
What if we add a /mnt/settings/registry/applications and a /mnt/settings/registry/extensions directory, have our programs install partial XML files in there and then use another program, say update-registry, to merge those files into the registry?
This would simplify both installing and uninstalling, since a package that has to update the registry just needs to contain a few extra files and call the update-registry program in its post-install and post-removal scripts.

The update-registry program could just be a very simple shell script that cats a header, the files in those directories and a footer together to form the registry.xml file.
The drawback is that this would not be compatible with programs that modify the registry.xml file directly (like the standard iLiad software), since those modifications will not affect the header/footer files.
But I guess a more complex update-registry program could handle that.

Is this just a silly idea? Is there a better way? What do you think?