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Re: fs-independent quotas (binary plists)
On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 05:22:24AM -0500, Matthew Mondor wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Nov 2011 10:50:17 +0100
> Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost> wrote:
> > In this context, "text format" means a key/value pair format, in which
> > some keys are optionnal and values can be of arbitrary types. Maybe you can
> > do this with a binary format too, but it doesn't exists yet.
> This reminds me that years ago someone implemented support to save
> plists in a binary format (this doesn't necessarily mean that it
> would help solve this problem, though). But I'm surprised that since
> all these years the support wasn't added; anyone know if there is
> general resistance to an optional compact and portable binary format,
> and if so, the reasons?
You know, I *thought* that there was general resistance to a binary
format because it had been repeated so often, but recently I re-read the
actual discussion that occurred and it seemed that there was *not* much
resistance at all.
I think that sometimes people bring up prior absolute prohibitions or
intractable resistance because they are too easily discouraged or else
they don't want to argue an issue on its merits.
> If such a format was supported, it wouldn't be harder to machine or
> human-process (proplib could be used as it is now for code, and bplists
> could be easily exported to an xml format as requested to edit in an
> editor, i.e. via a viplist, plistctl or such command (which also could
> use advisory locking, of course, and save back to binary format if the
> system is configured to use a binary format). In theory, it could also
> increase performance, and a binary format would be simpler to parse by
> the kernel than xml, minimizing bugs...
I do think that a binary plist format would be a handy option, however,
a binary plist is not as useful by itself as an XML plist, because there
less that you can do to it without specialized tools.
I have said it before, but I would hate to see further reduplication of
editors in UNIX, and that includes a plist editor. We need a way to
compose filters with editors!
dyoung%pobox.com@localhost Urbana, IL (217) 721-9981
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