[RFC] New revision serializer format

[Matt Nordhoff]

Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> Now that brisbane-core is coming along nicely, it seems to me like this
> is the right moment to also fix the revision serializer. The current one
> can't handle some characters (since they're not XML-escapable). 
> 
> It would be nice to get rid of this limitation, in particular since a
> consequence of it is that foreign vcs plugins have to escape
> XML-incompatible characters when pulling from $VCS into bzr. 
> 
> I'd like to provide a patch for this new revision serializer, but I'm
> wondering what the best format would be. XML seems suboptimal, since
> it's quite verbose, relatively slow and since it would require hacks to 

hacks to what?

> The main I option I see is something like rio, or perhaps some simple
> text-based key/value pair format.
> 
> Is there anything I'm missing here? Preferences for particular formats?
> Existing infrastructure I could use?

I don't know if it would actually work well, but bzrlib.util.bencode is
a simple, kinda-text based key/value-pair format.

> Cheers,
> 
> Jelmer
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