Re: [Psidev-ms-dev] Indexing in mzML

[Mike C. <tu...@gm...>]

On 6/19/07, Eric Deutsch <ede...@sy...> wrote:
> - While index/data mismatch is a potential source of problem, it has
> been our experience that problems are rare and the benefits huge.

Just to be clear, I'm not arguing against indexing in general (which
would be silly), but rather just questioning whether it makes sense to
include indices in (or alongside) mzML files.

>From a programming perspective, this seems like an implementation
detail.  One can imagine that many consumers of these files either
have no use for an index or else are easily capable of simply
generating an index of their own.  Furthermore, applications will
often have more information about the specific sort of index that
would be best.

As you note, if an index is included in the mzML file it can be
checked for sanity.  And, in fact, proper engineering requires this.
If a program generates the index itself, it can afford to be somewhat
trusting, but if the index is generated elsewhere, it really needs to
be quite paranoid, which requires extra code.

So the worry would be that this feature, which is intended to make
life simpler, might end up actually making things more difficult for
implementers (both producers and consumers) and bloat the mzML files
to boot.

Mike