On Fri, 15 Aug 2003 13:49:41 +0300 (EET DST), Tor Lillqvist <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I won't take any stand on either side (or how many sides are there?) in > the ongoing discussion, just air some fresh thoughts...
<taking a deep breath of fresh thoughts> [...] > Now, what concept do the ar, zip, etc formats closely resemble? What > other thingie is it that you store files in? Yeah, file systems. > > Wouldn't it be neat to use a real file system inside the image > file... I.e. the image file would be a self-contained file system, > with the image components (layers, XML files, whatnot) as files. > > What file system would be good? I don't know. Presumably something as > small and simple as possible, but not any simpler. Maybe FAT? ;-) > Early V6 Unix style file system (but with longer file names)? Minix? > Or something completely different? ISO9960 (I have no knowledge of > this, it might be way too complex)? UDF? There is unfortunately one thing that most of these filesystems have in common: they are designed to store their data in a partition that has a fixed size. If you create such a filesystem in a regular file, you have to pre-allocate the space that you will need for storing your data. I have played a lot with loopback filesystems, which are useful for creating things like a read-only encrypted ext2 or FAT filesystem on a CD-ROM. Unfortunately, this only works well when starting with a 600+MB file in which I create the image of the filesystem. It is not possible (or not easy) for the filesystem to grow as needed. We could have a mixed solution, in which the GIMP would start with a relatively small file containing a filesystem and then replace it with a larger one whenever necessary. But this is not elegant nor efficient, so the solution involving some kind of archive file format is better IMHO. The proposal for XML + some kind of archive format looks good, except that I do not like the fact that all metadata (especially parasites) will have to be XML-escaped or encoded in Base64. Some parts may be stored as separate files in the archive, but that does not make the decoding easier because this means that some parts of the metadata are included directly while others are included by reference. The main advantage of using XML is that it can easily be debugged by hand. The other arguments that have been discussed so far (for or against XML) are not so significant. If we want something that can be easily read and edited by humans, let's go for XML. If we want something compact and efficient, let's go for something else. -Raphaël _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
