[MERGE][RFC] Add simple revision serializer based on RIO.

John Arbash Meinel john at arbash-meinel.com
Tue May 12 15:07:06 BST 2009


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>>> However, before moving to RIO for future formats (and I say this
>>> having added the code) I would think hard about whether it should use
>>> bencode instead, which has the advantage of being able to represent
>>> somewhat more complex nesting (like dicts inside dicts) without
>>> needing a separate layer of encoding on top.  Revisions are pretty
>>> simple but even there it may be useful.  I'm not sure about the
>>> relative performance.
> 
>> The nice thing of RIO is that it is a lot more human-readable (and
>> writable). 
> 
> What use case for this? Is it really benefit?

For any of us that have to debug when things go wrong, it can be quite
beneficial.

If you get 'corrupted' data somehow, it is much easier to see what
should be there with something like RIO, rather than bencode. If only
because of the natural line-breaks in RIO.

For machine-machine conversations, there really isn't much difference.
But given 2 serializations, where the decode/encode complexity is the
same, preferring the one that humans can more easily understand seems
worthwhile.

John
=:->
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