Re: http://live.gnome.org/Boston2006/GStreamer

[Liam R E Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Thu, 2006-10-12 at 11:36 +0300, Stefan Kost wrote:
[...]
> Personally I worked on a binary registry feature
> (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=359653).
> The idea is to not use XML for the registry cache, as the cache is not
> supposed to be human readable, nor is there a need to transform it and
> make in platform independent. Making it a binary blob, allows us to drop
> libxml2 dependency.
> It should also be quicker and use less memory.
> This is work in progress, but here is a quick summary:
>   65133 2006-10-12 11:04 /home/ensonic/.gstreamer-0.10/registry.i686.bin
>  740429 2006-10-12 09:24 /home/ensonic/.gstreamer-0.10/registry.i686.xml
> time gst-inspect >/dev/null
>  xml-registry: real 0m0.246s  user 0m0.224s  sys 0m0.004s
>  bin-registry: real 0m0.095s  user 0m0.056s  sys 0m0.004s

So, this is about how much work you can do to save 0.151 seconds on
application startup at the expense of introducing an unreadable
binary file format that can only be used by one library?  Sounds
like a huge lose to me.  Why not use GConf for configuration?

Looking at the header files and the bug report suggests to me
that this may be a sort of plugin cache rather than a Windows-style
fragile binary configuration database, in which case it may make
more sense.  How robust is it against file corruption?  E.g. if
someone opens it in a text editor that strips out non-text
characters, and saves it.  Are there other possible uses beyond
the gstreamer library?

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org