Aryeh Gregor wrote:
On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 8:22 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
It should help improve dump speed by reducing the disk read rate, but the format isn't suitable for interchange.
Why not?
Because it's an undocumented binary diff format with sequence information compressed in a MediaWiki-specific way, which is packed into an array and then serialized using PHP's undocumented serialization format, then compressed with zlib using undocumented parameters, then stored in a MediaWiki-specific object, then serialized again. It's not a process that's interchange-friendly.
-- Tim Starling