[ZODB-Dev] Re: AdaptableStorage - format of property files

[Jeff Kowalczyk]

Many windows text editors (beyond notepad) will respect or optionally convert unix and dos
formats.

It would seem more important to have the metadata - particularly pickles - in a uniform
cross-platform format, so that the adapter doesn't have to examine the filesystem object
representation before loading to activate or restoring from a backup that possibly came
from another platform or was synthesized from external data. Add-on tools like external
python scripts to create or manipulate .property files, also have to get that much smarter
if you introduce a CR/CR-LF mode.

For projects that will encourage end user hand- or external tool- editing, an adapter
using a richer or more editing-friendly format is probably called for (YAML would be
really cool)

Considering the small subset of windows-using FileSystem Adaptable Storage who do want to
hand-edit .proprerty text files and yet don't have an advanced text editor, I'd vote to
keep it LF-only. I'd think of an AS that is configured to use a different property file
format as a distinctly new storage type, which is fine, there'll be lots of subclasses by
virtue of the very nature of Adaptable Storage.

"Shane Hathaway" <shane@zope.com> wrote
> Sergey Konozenko wrote:
> > properties files are written in "binary" format - no LF to CR,LF
> I think FSConnection.writeData() needs to accept an optional "mode"
> argument, which would cover most of the problem.  Metadata files will
> also have to be written in text mode, but I'm not entirely sure that the
> text-mode pickles will survive the translation.  What do you think?