newformat format change

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

> Well, back in the beginning of the project, it was determined to use XML 
> for data storage. It was a really big benefit for the inventory, perhaps 
> not quite as much for the Revision information.
> But since we are using XML, we should try and use it as much as possible 
> in the files, to be consistent.

Storages are weaves now, revision-history is a list of lines in
a plain file, and so on. I'm not saying that XML is bad, but consistence
is not something I'd take into account right now. We could even get
consistent by removing XML from the project completely, for instance.

> I think XML is very decent for long-term storage, it's a little extra
> verbose, but in something that may sit on disk a long time, being able
> to figure it out after some time is pretty nice.

RFC822 is out there for quite some time, and it's plain text. :-)

> Honestly, a revision is pretty small, and I don't think you would save 
[...]

[niemeyer at burma ../revision-store]% du -sh
7.2M    .

That's from bzr itself.

> >or even
> >
> >  Committer: ...
> >  Inventory: ...
> >  Message:
> >    ...
> >  Parents:
> >    ...
> >    ...
> >
> >in rfc822 style, which is weave-friendly.
> 
> rfc822 style was a possibility. I believe it was discussed a long time 
> ago. And I think XML was genuinely chosen (not just happened).

I'm sure it was.. but we didn't have weaves back there, nor
a real feeling of the impact of the revision store in a real
world project.

Of course, I'm not saying that changing is something really
necessary. But I wouldn't like to stick to some standard just
because it's already there, if doing it another way would be
better and was just a step away.

> But you would have to grep the archives for the real discussions.

Thanks for pointing that out.

-- 
Gustavo Niemeyer
http://niemeyer.net