On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 05:22:24AM -0500, Matthew Mondor wrote: > 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?
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 dyo...@pobox.com Urbana, IL (217) 721-9981