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Re: [Duplicity-talk] Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Tar replacement - format p
From: |
Will Dyson |
Subject: |
Re: [Duplicity-talk] Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Tar replacement - format proposal |
Date: |
Fri, 26 Sep 2003 17:07:25 -0400 |
On Fri, 2003-09-26 at 09:16, John Goerzen wrote:
Originally sent this just to John, but intended it for the whole list.
> Moreover, you don't need XML for what you are trying to achieve. All you
> need is something "more versatile than tar". It shouldn't be hard to arrive
> at a key/value system. For instance, for files, you could have:
>
> NAME\0/foo/bar/baz\0
> MTIME\0514341312\0
> CTIME\03413413214\0
>
> Of course, you could write the MTIME and CTIME in binary, and you could
> abbreviate those names to "N", "M", and "C" to save time. What's more, this
> format is quite extensible, almost to the same degree as XML, and you save
> space in the archive and space in memory and library requirements, not to
> mention ease processing.
>
> Null-terminated strings are easy for anyone to parse without having to load
> a separate library. (You could also use Pascal-style "leading length byte"
> strings, which are also easy to parse.)
If we decide to echew XML, I would go with something like the record-jar
format described in The Art of Unix Programming
(http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch05s02.html).
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
Name: /foo/bar/baz
...
AclEntry-read-permit-1: username
AclEntry-read-permit-2: otheruser
AclEntry-read-deny-1: someuser
...
%%
But I think it is worth considering the hassle of this vs the hassle of
creating a stripped down or special purpose xml parser.
--
Will Dyson
"Back off man, I'm a scientist!" -Dr. Peter Venkman
- Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Tar replacement - format proposal, (continued)
Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Tar replacement - format proposal, Ben Escoto, 2003/09/26
Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Tar replacement - format proposal, John Goerzen, 2003/09/26
Re: [Duplicity-talk] Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Tar replacement - format proposal,
Will Dyson <=
[rdiff-backup-users] Re: [Duplicity-talk] Tar replacement - format proposal, Will Dyson, 2003/09/26
Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Tar replacement - format proposal, Rob Browning, 2003/09/28