Re:[pilot-db-list] Bugs, features, and random musings (long)

[Tom D. <td...@us...>]

On Thursday 05 July 2001 12:58 pm, mik...@al... wrote:

> But storing them as "true" and "false" requires 4 and 5 bytes,
> respectively. At worst, they could be stored as a native 16-bit integer 0
> or 1; this would consume 2 bytes each - a > 50% savings. If they could be
> stored as 8-bit bytes, then it's > 75%. Surely either of those would be
> preferable to text strings! Again, I haven't looked at the code, so maybe
> I'm full of hot air, but _if_ they are really stored as strings, you could
> save a lot of space by converting them.

Boolean fields are stored as a single byte. Look at the DB_PackRecord 
function to see how fields are packed into the PalmOS database. The PDB file 
is so large because the PDB file contains not only the packed data but also a 
header containing the database structure as well as the PalmOS record headers 
and PalmOS PDB header. There is a lot more in the PDB file than just the data!

> Thanks again for a great program! I noticed at least one person
> volunteered for documentation. If you would like a "doc team", I'll help
> out.

It should be possible to give CVS access to people doing a lot of 
documentation so that you could just update the DB source tree directly with 
the documentation.

I am thinking the documentation should probably reside in the docs/ 
subdirectory just like the existing documentation. We could have:

docs/manual/en
docs/manual/fr

and such to support more than one language.