Re: Caldera installation - something Debian should learn
R Garth Wood <rgwood@peace.netnation.com> writes:
> I believe cvs does binary files now as well.
Only in a very loose sense. If you change a binary file, it stores
the whole thing. You can't see what has actually changed. Which
makes this feature all-but-useless. Plus, it's incredibly
storage-inefficient.
> To sum up:
> Databases offer:
> better speed
Not enough to notice unless you have *huge* amounts of data. Config
file are unlikely to benefit from the ability to sort and search
quickly -- which is the biggest advantage db's offer here -- configs
are usually read in their entirety.
> smaller size.
Mostly because you can't easily store comments with a given db entry.
One advantage of text files is that you *can* have all sorts of handy,
useful comments stored in the config file. Even comments on
particular settings chosen by local admins.
Also, while the data *itself* may be slightly smaller, the code to
parse it becomes much larger. And, frequently, much less portable.
> other inhereted database properties
Such as? So far, I'm not seeing *any* advantages that are worth
anything.
> text files have:
> the "advantage" that they can be edited easily
> consider: what if you're logging in remotely and they
> only have telnet or it's a slow connection?
> ppl are used to them
> this I think is the strongest point. Retraining
> is a major concern.
> they are not NT
Also, text files are *readable*, don't rely on specialized tools, and
offer far greater flexibility. It's not just a matter of editing
them, text files can be *parsed* by perl (or other langauge) scripts
that can make intelligent decisions based on their contents. Yes, you
can write a perl db api, but that doesn't help the poor sucker who's
using sh or Python or C or Eiffel or CLOS or Scheme or Forth or
Snobol. All of those languages *can* and do parse text out of the
box.
Also, text files are *simple*, and don't require powerful db engines
to be installed. For people who want to make minimal installations
for embedded systems or such (c.f. the Linux Router Project), this is
a very big issue.
Also text files are inherently platform indepedent. Many db's are
not, and the ones that are are larger and slower than the ones that
aren't.
A text file can easily be copied to a second machine, and quickly
edited if need be. A text file can often be recreated with no more
tools than *cat* available, when the system has major corruption. A
db will make the system far less flexible, far less stable, and far
less maintainable.
--
Chris Waters xtifr@dsp.net | I have a truly elegant proof of the
or xtifr@debian.org | above, but it is too long to fit into
http://www.dsp.net/xtifr | this .signature file.
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