Re: Config_Files proposal

[Stephen Leake <stephen.a.leake.1@gsfc.nasa.gov>]

"Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org> writes:

> Well, if, for example, the decisions for the API lead to some kind of
> complex tree-like structure, you might have a really hard time storing this
> in some simpler file format like .CSV or as simple attribute/value pairs.

But that would violate the requirement that the API _must_ be
independent of the file format, and would therefore be a bad API
decision.

> I suggested elsewhere that establishing a package spec now and
> leaving the file format for later would be a wise thing. It starts
> some progress and helps clarify the problems. 

If I generalize this to "make some decisions now", choosing the file
format now is also wise :).

> Assumimg that the API is going to have something pretty basic like
> "Load/Store" operations with a file name and a data structure, you
> really don't have to settle the file format issues until later & it
> creates the possibility of trying out many different ones.

Since we need to settle on one file format, and we've had about a
month of discussion on it, what more needs to be done to pick a file
format? 

-- 
-- Stephe