On Thu, 17 Nov 2011 10:50:17 +0100 Manuel Bouyer <bou...@antioche.eu.org> 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? 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... [1] ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/freza/bplist-2007-10-27.diff Thanks, -- Matt
