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Linus Torvalds: “I'm happily hacking on a new save format using ‘libgit2’”

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Re: Linus Torvalds: “I'm happily hacking on a new save format using ‘libgit2’”

#161

Post by icefox »

cbsmith wrote: post #74
tzury wrote: post #5

I just realized that Linus' posts are the only reason I ever go to Google Plus.

The question nobody is asking, but actually should is: I wonder what other good G+ content you are missing? G+ is largely misunderstood. It is a lousy tool for interaction with people connected to you purely socially. It's a very good way to find and interact with people connected to you by interest.

The really sad thing is that I have tried several times to search for content that I know exists on G+, but I can't find it, even when I knew the author. After the third time failing at this my usage of G+ dropped significantly. Of all of the things that you would think would work search would be at the top... :|

Re: Linus Torvalds: “I'm happily hacking on a new save format using ‘libgit2’”

#162

Post by crucialfelix »

bananas wrote: post #13

I think this title is wrong. Firstly some clarification - this appears to just be about the persistence format for his dive log. It was XML, now it's git based with plain text. As someone who had to manage a system which worked with plain text files structured in a filesystem for a number of years in the 1990s, this is done to death already. You now end up with the following problems: locking, synchronising filesyste…

I took this to mean that what he is replacing is a single XML file whose content is a tree of element nodes. Every time you have to make a change to that file (changing, removing or adding children nodes within the file) you would have to store a new copy of the file. The most efficient you can get is to store just the text diffs using git or something.

But what he replaces it with is a git object store. Each xml-node becomes a git object. They each point to a parent (just as git commits point to a parent commit).

Now writing to this datastore means adding a new node to the git object database and changing the parent references.

Where git stores commits that are related sequentially in time, this stores nodes in a tree relationship that IS the document.

If he's not talking about this then I'd like to officially take credit for my weird idea right now.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “I'm happily hacking on a new save format using ‘libgit2’”

#163

Post by buster »

e12e wrote: post #75
buster wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been working with restructured Text a lot, it's a breeze as well. Seems quite similar.

Just a note, pandoc (implemented in Haskell) makes it almost a joy to work with various "dialects" of ReST/AsciiDoc/Markdown etc. It feels like what python's ReST should have been (at least the last time I looked, it was pretty hard to get different html out of it - even if it is supposed to be extendible). If you have a dependency on python, staying with the python libs are probably best, but if you just want "a doc…

Actually, i am using sphinx and latexpdf to generate project documentation and it is more then awesome to generate beautiful looking LaTeX documents with graphiz graphs in high-res but only writing rst... :)

Re: Linus Torvalds: “I'm happily hacking on a new save format using ‘libgit2’”

#165

Post by hdevalence »

seabee wrote: post #149
TelmoMenezes wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good point, but I feel that discouraging this type of approach is not the way to go. I apologise in advance for ranting... I hope this is not too off-topic, but instead a "zoom out" on the issue. This touches on something deep and wrong about how we use computers these days. Computers are really good at being computers, and the amplification of intellectual capabilities they afford is tremendous, but this i…

In a world where users will willingly enter malicious code into their computers if they believe it will do something they want[1], can there really be a better way? [1] https://www.facebook.com/selfxss

This seems like exactly the problem the parent post is complaining about, though: the people in the limited group the parent talks about aren't the people being tricked by selfxss, it's the people who don't have the technical knowledge to understand what the developer console does and why pasting in random JS might be a bad idea. So the phenomenon of selfxss reinforces the point.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “I'm happily hacking on a new save format using ‘libgit2’”

#166

Post by outworlder »

Touche wrote: post #111
mrcharles wrote: post #94

On the game I'm currently working on, it's built very heavily around Lua. So for the save system, we simply fill a large Lua table, and then write that to disk, as Lua code. The 'save' file then simply becomes a Lua file that can be read directly into Lua. This is absolutely amazing for debugging purposes. Also you never have to worry about corrupt save files or anything of it's ilk. Development is easier, diagnosing…

That's how people are going to cheat at your game.

The save format does not matter at all. It wouldn't matter even if it were an obscure, made-up format. All it would do is slow down 'cheaters' by half an hour.

The only argument against human-editable text files is parsing speed, not security.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “I'm happily hacking on a new save format using ‘libgit2’”

#168

Post by outworlder »

bhaak wrote: post #15

What's with all the XML hate? Of course, doing everything in XML is a stupid idea (e.g. XSLT and Ant) and thanks heaven that hype is over. But if I want something that is able to express data structures customized by myself, usually with hierarchical data that can be verified for validity and syntax (XML Schemas or old-school DTD), what other options are there? Doing hierarchical data in SQL is a bitch and if you wan…

Because XML solves a 'problem' in the worst possible way. It is not that easy to parse for machines and only the simplest XML files are readable by humans.

Besides, since 1960 or thereabouts we have S-Expressions. The world should just have used that without reinventing the wheel once again.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “I'm happily hacking on a new save format using ‘libgit2’”

#169

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

bhaak wrote: post #15

What's with all the XML hate? Of course, doing everything in XML is a stupid idea (e.g. XSLT and Ant) and thanks heaven that hype is over. But if I want something that is able to express data structures customized by myself, usually with hierarchical data that can be verified for validity and syntax (XML Schemas or old-school DTD), what other options are there? Doing hierarchical data in SQL is a bitch and if you wan…

I haven't used it myself, but lisp seems well suited to the task. I've also heard good things about yaml, which is more well-supported by your language of choice.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “I'm happily hacking on a new save format using ‘libgit2’”

#170

Post by WalterBright »

Back in the bad old DOS days, instead of creating a file format for saving/loading the configuration of the text editor, I simply wrote out the image in memory of the executable to the executable file. (The configuration was written to static global variables.)

Running the new executable then loaded the new configuration. This worked like a champ, up until the Age of Antivirus Software, which always had much grief over writing to executable files.

It's a trick I learned from the original Fortran version of ADVENT.

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