Re: gEDA-user: Functional blocks and PCB format changes

[Andrew Poelstra <asp11@xxxxxx>]

On Sun, Sep 05, 2010 at 03:00:45AM +0200, kai-martin knaak wrote:
> Andrew Poelstra wrote:
> 
> > The point is that we can't be sure what the future will bring in terms
> > of IOPS, storage capacity (even big servers often RAID together dozens
> > of small drives to get high speeds against low capacity).
> 
> This kind of argument goes against any change. geda development 
> already almost grind to halt because of it. 
>
> ...
> 
> > Plus, even if individual file bloat is something we can ignore, what
> > happens when you have thousands or millions of files in source control
> > or in backups?
> 
> How would XML lead to millions of files?
> 

XML brings with it an enormous cost in terms of file size and parsing speed.
There will be millions of files regardless. But with a million files, every
kilobyte of bloat becomes a gigabyte of bloat.

We could use a zipped-XML format and avoid the filesize problems, but then
we make script-parsability a lot harder.

Actually, using any whitespace-independent format makes script-parsability
harder, since tools such as grep or sed treat newlines specially. Also,
comments are harder to insert.


Andrew



_______________________________________________
geda-user mailing list
geda-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user