[GD-General] A portable preferences library

[Brian H. <ho...@py...>]

Everyone seems like they have to write their own portable 
preferences/registry wrapper.  I've got one that I hacked up, and I'm 
currently in the process of refactoring it and will make it open 
source.

It is designed to be minimal, and will wrap around the Windows 
registry; CFPreferences on MacOS/OS X; and the standard file system on 
Linux.

The features will be:

- open/close/delete a preferences object

- read/write 16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit, float, double, string, and 
byte-bucket objects safely (e.g. endianess)

- delete keys

Preference objects can be opened either system-wide (corresponding to 
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE on Windows, "/Library" on OS X, "/usr/local/share" 
on Linux) or locally (corresponding to HKEY_CURRENT_USER on Windows, 
"~/Library" on OS X, and "~" on Linux).

If you do not have privilege for the operation, tough cookies -- it's 
the app's responsibility to ensure that appropriate privilege exists.

Key enumeration is not planned at this time.

As an example, using an ad hoc API, it would look something like:

prefs p;

PrefsLib_OpenPrefs( &p, "~/MyCompany/ThisGame" ); //local to user
PrefsLib_WriteFloat( p, "joystickX", fJoystick );
PrefsLib_WriteString( p, "username", getUserName() );
PrefsLib_ClosePrefs( p );

You get the gist.

If anyone has comments/suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Brian