Re: Should the format used by NSArchiver be changed to XML?

[Willem Rein Oudshoorn]

Gregory Casamento <greg_casamento@yahoo.com> writes:

> > About 10-50% slower I would guess. 
> 
> Also true.   Most archives load in a very short amount of time, so, unless
> you're using a relatively slow machine, it shouldn't impact you too much.

Well you would be slightly more concerned if you are dealing with
archives bigger than 100Mb.  (space and time)
 
> > But what is the added flexibility?  
> 
> The ability to manipulate the data outside of GNUstep.

But what kind of manipulations are you thinking about?
In my opinion you need to design the file format with
the kind of manipulations in mind.  

To give an extreem example, if I just encode the output
format with uuencode than the output is in a certain sense
also ASCII and can be edited.  
This is of course not what you want.  
But in whatever format you do the encoding, basically
it will be just an object graph dump.  This makes editing
rather tricky because you need to be aware of how the application
is implemented.

But one advantage is of course debugging.  You can see exactly
what is encodeded and how.

> > I think there can be added flexibility, but than you need more than
> > just change the "binary" output to "xml" output.  
> >
> > Wim Oudshoorn.
> 
> It seems, given the need for a layer to make output of the archive "generic",
> that a framework is indicated.   I was hoping for something which could be
> integrated into GNUstep itself.

Oh, but you could write your own XMLArchiver XMLUnarchiver class and 
put them into the Base "Additions".
Or you can make the NSArchiver into a small class cluster and
depending on the initialization (or some default) pick one
or the other.

Wim Oudshoorn.