newformat format change

[Aaron Bentley]

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Gustavo Niemeyer wrote:
>>But even without nested inventories, it would get pretty complex to
>>try and write RFC822 inventory information, since you have a lot of
>>files in an inventory, and a lot of information about each file.
> 
> 
> FileID: bzrignore-20050311232317-81f7b71efa2db11a
> Kind: file
> Name: .bzrignore
> 
> FileID: rsyncexclude-20050408053852-27e0a5928b6829f645beb2e6
> Kind: file
> Name: .rsyncexclude

RFC822 formatting doesn't group data that way.  Or rather, the
.rsyncexclude data would be the message body.

That looks more like ini format:
[bzrignore-20050311232317-81f7b71efa2db11a]
Kind="file"
Name=".bzrignore"

[rsyncexclude-20050408053852-27e0a5928b6829f645beb2e6]
Kind="file"
Name=".rsyncexclude"

> Does that look complex?

No, but you've omitted a lot of inventory data.  Most crucially, you
haven't specified how parent directories are indicated, or how to
specify additional metadata.

> In fact, it's not only simple, but also very fast to parse.

I don't think parsing speed is a significant factor for us.  Weave
extraction probably dwarfs it.

> So far I have not seen a case of nesting in bzr's storage that would
> make XML necessary.

Properties look like an obvious example to me.  You might also want to
check out http://bazaar.canonical.com/InventoryFormatV2 for an example
of nested inventories.

Of course, nothing's *necessary*.  We could write an alternative format.
 XML was picked mainly because of the broad tool support, and because it
solved issues like nesting and encoding.

Aaron
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