Subj : human-readable nodelist format
To : Scott Little
From : Jasen Betts
Date : Wed Nov 06 2002 06:31 pm
Hi Scott.
05-Nov-02 17:54:52, Scott Little wrote to andrew clarke
SL> [ 05 Nov 02 10:31, andrew clarke wrote to Scott Little ]
ac>> The hierachy is only important when it comes down to default mail
ac>> routing, and politics. Parsing software should be able to handle
SL> Thing is, this format requires at least two scans of the nodelist
SL> to find a node and it's uplink. The only shortcut is to assume an
SL> uplink of /0 for normal nodes
Thats what indexes are for. properly indexed it would requre zero scans
(just two lookups). there's no reason to make the index part of the standard
though, that's for the appliction developers to handle - they could even
import the wholw nodelist it into a SQL database if they want :)
ac>> goes on now to propose what should happen in future. I do think
ac>> a diff format that is standard (like GNU diff/patch) should be
ac>> used rather than the obscure format used with nodediffs now.
SL> "diff" has a mode that is more or less identical to the current
SL> nodediff format
I concurr. the current noddiff format is very similar looking to a gnu/unix
diff format
SL> It's no more difficult than back tracing "uplink" keywords until
SL> you bump into a node that I'm able to connect to
as above, an index would definitely help with that,
ac>> And I should add to the current spec that "keywords in the
ac>> nodelist that are not recognised should be ignored"
