Re: [Registry] change

[Jens A. <ra...@sk...>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Avi Alkalay" <avi...@gm...>
To: "Jens Andersen" <ra...@sk...>
Cc: <reg...@li...>
Sent: Tuesday, October 19, 2004 12:36 AM
Subject: Re: [Registry] change


> Tomorrow I have 2 hours flight, and few more hours to look at this
> problem. I'll come up with a solution.
>
> About the binary encoding/decoding stuff, folks, let me tell you I'd
> also prefer to just fwrite it, but I participated in some discussions
> in the early early days of Elektra (when I was still using Berkeley
> DB), and users blamed me hard regarding non-human-editable binary
> sandboxes, so the purpose is to have 100% plain text values, and put a
> lot of warnings in documentation that UNIX sysadmins do not like to
> handle binary configurations, and discourage its use.
>
> Read this:
> http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch05s01.html (by Eric Raymond)
> http://www.orkut.com/CommMsgs.aspx?cmm=141&tid=64 (there are a lot of
> flames there)
>
> This encode/decode subject is still an open discussion, and I ask you
> to share your ideas.

While I completely see your point, there is one thing wrong with it: Binary 
data can't be edited by hand regardless of whether it's encoded or not!
No system administrator is going to sit by hand and convert integers to HEX 
in order to set the value..Or even moreso text. If people use the binary 
data it is because the data isn't mean to be edited by hand. I agree that it 
shouldn't be used often, but on the other hand I can see uses for it.
If the binary values are going to be there, whether or not they are encoded 
as HEX isn't going to make any difference at all...
An example of use could be having an internal structure containing int's and 
similar non-pointer values. With binary data you could save this data to 
disk and hence make it harder to edit by hand (some data might not be 
suitable for manually editing..Only other alternative would be encrypting 
the data...). Not all values that you wish to save somewhere is meant for 
human eyes...
Anyways, that's my oppion :)
If binary data is a blackbox, it's equally so a blackbox regardless of how 
it's encoded! :)

Regards,
Jens Andersen