From: Thomas Sawyer <transfire@...>
Date: 2008-07-28T01:35:41+09:00
Subject: Re: Library Metadata Storage Format

Thanks for the response David. Thinking through thes issues all by 
myself and get a little stir crazy, so getting some feedback like this 
really helps.

David Masover wrote:
> YAML is also in the standard library, so if you're targeting anything
> resembling a standard distribution of Ruby, it'll be there.
> 
>> Also automated manipulation of YAML files isn't all 
>> that optimal --round trip a YAML file and formatting can become fairly
>> distorted.
> 
> Because YAML is a serialization format. They make good config files, but 
> do
> you really need to support comments in the file? Your other proposal 
> doesn't
> seem to allow for that, anyway...

Hmm.. that true. That's part of the issue really. To be more specific, I 
want to automate version bumping. If I rewrite the whole metadata.yaml 
file to update the version entry, you are right, bye bye comments. 
Another option is to hack a regexp solution. It would probably work ok 
most of the time. But that's a hacky band-aid kind of fix.

>> The
>> downside of course is that a dozen of so little files can seem a bit
>> unwieldy and can waste file system space (depending on block size).
> 
> My attitude is, do what's convenient, and let the filesystem worry about 
> disk
> space. Some filesystems support concepts like "sub blocks" and "tail 
> packing"
> which can lead to quite efficient storage of small files.

Good point. Leave storage to the storage guys. It would only be a dozen 
files or so, so we're not talking a whole lot of space anyway.

> Worry more about the usability of it. If you litter the project with 
> small
> files, is that going to be annoying for users? I know one of the selling
> points of git over SVN is that git stores one .git folder at the top of 
> the
> checkout, whereas SVN stores a .svn folder in every directory of the
> checkout.

Yea, I hate that about svn. This won't be a problem here; the files 
would be in one special directory. It can be annoying to edit them all, 
at least for the first go round, after that they rarely change. The 
other thing is for tools that might want to scrape project info. (a la 
CSPAN's META.yml) I wonder if it would be too much trouble for this 
usecase to have to fetch multiple files (of course, I could always 
generate an index file based on the separate files).

I came across another good reason to use separate files -- say I use a 
generator (eg. rubigen) to scaffold out a license. It would add the 
LICENSE (or COPYING) file to my project, but it would also want to 
update the metadata entry. That's easy if there's a separate 
meta/license file. If there were a reliable way to update a YAML file in 
a piecemeal fashion, then this wouldn't be much of an issue; but without 
that... well I guess I'm just not sure how comfortable I feel with a 
"usually works" regexp hack.

T.
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