On Mon, 24 Apr 1995, Jeremy Elson wrote: > The advantages of ASCII files should be obvious to anyone: they're easier > to use. They can be easily edited and viewed without special utilties. > They are portable between systems and even between MUDs. New features can > be added without problems of corruption. Etc. If I had the time to, I'd of converted to ASCII pfiles. The main feature I'm looking for is that I can easily add things to the MUD that won't result in pfile corruption or the need to write any excess things. You're choices here are to either do it like Merc, or the like the db format (idnum "#", name~, title~, desc~, flags, etc). It'd be really nice to have it either way. > I was faced with this problem most recently when inventing the plrtext > (Player Text) system for saving players' textual data: poofins, poofouts, > saved aliases, etc. This would increase the number of places where player > data is stored to 3 (playerfile, rentfile, playertext file), most likely > blowing away the space savings of the binary file paradigm, which as I > mentioned before isn't even an important point anyway. So THAT'S what it was for, for the life of me, I couldn't quite hit on what that'd be used for :). Anyway, my suggestion would be (a) have the option to use gzipped or tarred (or both) pfiles for the directories (ie., be able to compress A-E to a-e.tgz) to make the storage point more moot than previous, (b) and either provide a makefile option or config.c option to enable a quick switch back to binary if wanted. Or something or rather.
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