Re: fs-independent quotas (binary plists)

[David Young <dyoung%pobox.com@localhost>]

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[1] (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!

Dave

-- 
David Young
dyoung%pobox.com@localhost    Urbana, IL    (217) 721-9981