+1
And given how messy the revision data can be, having the possibility of actually inspecting it with a text editor is a great boon.
That said, there may be other use cases that I am not aware of for which a binary format might be useful, but if you just need to parse and pipe to a DB, text is the best option.
Giovanni
Hi,
As a regular of user of dump files I would not want a "fancy" file format with indexes stored as trees etc.
I parse all the dump files (both for SQL tables and the XML files) with a one pass parser which inserts the data I want (which sometimes is only a small fraction of the total amount of data in the file) into my local database. I will normally never store uncompressed dump files, but pipe the uncompressed data directly from bunzip or gunzip to my parser to save disk space. Therefore it is important to me that the format is simple enough for a one pass parser.
I cannot really imagine who would use a library with object oriented API to read dump files. No matter what it would be inefficient and have fewer features and possibilities than using a real database.
I could live with a binary format, but I have doubts if it is a good idea. It will be harder to take sure that your parser is working correctly, and you have to consider things like endianness, size of integers, format of floats etc. which give no problems in text formats. The binary files may be smaller uncompressed (which I don't store anyway) but not necessary when compressed, as the compression will do better on text files.
Regards,
- Byrial
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