On Sun, Sep 05, 2010 at 03:00:45AM +0200, kai-martin knaak wrote: > Andrew Poelstra wrote: > > > The point is that we can't be sure what the future will bring in terms > > of IOPS, storage capacity (even big servers often RAID together dozens > > of small drives to get high speeds against low capacity). > > This kind of argument goes against any change. geda development > already almost grind to halt because of it. > > ... > > > Plus, even if individual file bloat is something we can ignore, what > > happens when you have thousands or millions of files in source control > > or in backups? > > How would XML lead to millions of files? >
XML brings with it an enormous cost in terms of file size and parsing speed. There will be millions of files regardless. But with a million files, every kilobyte of bloat becomes a gigabyte of bloat. We could use a zipped-XML format and avoid the filesize problems, but then we make script-parsability a lot harder. Actually, using any whitespace-independent format makes script-parsability harder, since tools such as grep or sed treat newlines specially. Also, comments are harder to insert. Andrew _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user