Re: fs-independent quotas (binary plists)

[Matthew Mondor <mm_lists%pulsar-zone.net@localhost>]

On Thu, 17 Nov 2011 10:50:17 +0100
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost> wrote:

> In this context, "text format" means a key/value pair format, in which
> some keys are optionnal and values can be of arbitrary types. Maybe you can
> do this with a binary format too, but it doesn't exists yet.

This reminds me that years ago someone implemented support to save
plists in a binary format[1] (this doesn't necessarily mean that it
would help solve this problem, though).  But I'm surprised that since
all these years the support wasn't added; anyone know if there is
general resistance to an optional compact and portable binary format,
and if so, the reasons?

If such a format was supported, it wouldn't be harder to machine or
human-process (proplib could be used as it is now for code, and bplists
could be easily exported to an xml format as requested to edit in an
editor, i.e. via a viplist, plistctl or such command (which also could
use advisory locking, of course, and save back to binary format if the
system is configured to use a binary format).  In theory, it could also
increase performance, and a binary format would be simpler to parse by
the kernel than xml, minimizing bugs...

[1] ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/freza/bplist-2007-10-27.diff

Thanks,
-- 
Matt