Performance improvement for xml loads (+comments)

[Derek Atkins]

Patrick Spinler <spinler.patrick@mayo.edu> writes:

> This is the true reason why all the major unix subsystems do their
> configurations in ASCII flat files.  Think about apache, for instance,
> or even worse, sendmail.  That's one hellish config file, especially
> since it has to be parsed on startup _every_single_time_, which happens
> frequently on e.g. a busy mail system.  Yet, neither of these monsters
> have gone to a binary config file format (although I will grant you that
> sendmail's is pretty, um, obfuscated :-).  Go hunt around on the
> sendmail or apache mailing list archives, or the linux kernel archives,
> etc.  In all of these cases, you can find discussions about binary vrs
> text config file formats.  The discussions are illuminating.

Config files are different than data files.  Yes, config files (which
by definition have a human interface to them ;) should be readable and
modifyable by humans.  But also, to take the sendmail example, look at
how sendmail deals with mail aliases.  The user uses emacs or vi to
create a file, and then processes that file into a binary format for
the sendmail application.  Sendmail itself never reads the ascii
aliases file.

So the question is: are these data files meant as a storage backend
for GnuCash, or are they meant for users to interface to directly?  I
think some people here are in the latter camp, while I am firmly in
the former.

> -- Pat

-derek
-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
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