Re: [Duplicity-talk] Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Tar replacement - format proposal

[Rob Browning]

Will Dyson <address@hidden> writes:

> However, XML has the desirable property of being hierarchical. This is
> nice when describing things like ACLs. Hierarchical structures can be
> flattened into something like this

Heh, or perhaps a syntax that's often maligned, but extremely well
defined, very flexible, and one that you can parse unambiguously with
tiny parsers ;>

  ("/foo/bar/baz"
   (atime 49228382)
   (ctime 33929322)
   (acl (read-permit "foo" "bar")
        (read-deny "someuser")))

could be tranlated straight to a a "hash tree" for perl/python:

  $file{'atime'}
  $file{'acl'}{'read-permit'}

etc., and you could handle the binary data separately with
length-prefixing, i.e.

("/foo/bar" ...)
231123
[~230K binary data for bar here]

In any case, I agree that a text format is a good idea.

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org; previously @cs.utexas.edu
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