Re: RFC: Appreciation of .gmodel format (was deprecation)

[Stefan Urbanek]

On 2004-01-06 17:47:30 +0100 Alexander Malmberg <alexander@malmberg.org> wrote:

> Gregory John Casamento wrote:
> > --- Georg Fleischmann <georg@vhf.de> wrote:

<snip>

> Writing a subclass of NSData (or, more appropriately, NSCoder) that
> encodes as text is fairly easy, but also pointless. The resulting text
> would be no more readable than the output of 'hexdump foo.gorm'. Eg. for
> NSView, we have:
>
> ...
>   [aCoder encodeRect: _frame];
>   [aCoder encodeRect: _bounds];
>   [aCoder encodeValueOfObjCType: @encode(BOOL) at:
> &_is_rotated_from_base];
>   [aCoder encodeValueOfObjCType: @encode(BOOL)
>                              at: &_is_rotated_or_scaled_from_base];
>   [aCoder encodeValueOfObjCType: @encode(BOOL) at:
> &_post_frame_changes];
>   [aCoder encodeValueOfObjCType: @encode(BOOL) at:
> &_autoresizes_subviews];
>   [aCoder encodeValueOfObjCType: @encode(unsigned int) at:
> &_autoresizingMask];
> ...
>
> so instead of a bit of binary data, you'd get something like "0.0 0.0
> 100.0 100.0 0.0 0.0 100.0 100.0 0 0 0 1 5" .... Sure, it's text, but
> you'd go insane if you tried to edit it by hand. :)
>
> I believe what Georg Fleischmann wants isn't just a text format, it's a
> structured, human readable text format.

What about NSKeyedArchiver and NSKeyedUnarchiver? Are there any plans to 
imlpement those classes in GNUstep? They can definitely help in creating 
readable object dumps (using textual versions of those archivers).

Cocoa reference:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/ObjC_classic/Classes/NSKeyedArchiver.html#//apple_ref/occ/cl/NSKeyedArchiver

Btw. Apple docs about archiving are using keyed archiver as an example.

Stefan Urbanek
--
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