Re: Module proposal: dconf

[Jan Claeys <lists janc be>]

Op woensdag 14-10-2009 om 15:54 uur [tijdzone +0100], schreef Alan Cox:
> > - FS have much better support of tools which recover the data. Well -
> > you cannot edit by XML editor but both FAT and EXT2/3/4 have numerous
> > tools that recovers data - even less popular systems like reiserfs have
> > them. I haven't seen them for many application binary format.
> 
> So write one. The format is visible, the code is open source. You should
> just need xml2vomit and vomit2xml or whatever format data you use. 

What you really need to fix broken/corrupted configuration files is a
*very* intelligent parser that can find all leftover data.

When the configuration is saved as text this "parser" tends to be the
sysadmins, who can read text & text markup based files despite lots of
errors because they are humans and because of that they have to read
broken grammar & spelling all the time...  ;-)

When saving things in binary files, sysadmins can't read those files, or
they have to rely on tools that try to be "intelligent" about reading
broken files, but most of the time they are broken in a way that wasn't
foreseen by the programmed "intelligence".

What we really need to have for robust configuration storage is a file
format that is both fast to read in a binary way, and easy to read by
sysadmins as text (without conversion from binary to text, as conversion
won't work after corruption).


(Some binary formats might work too (with the help from appropriate
tools), if they partition & align data in a way that can't get (easily)
disrupted by file corruption.)


-- 
Jan Claeys