Re: Request: Test suite for EFS

[Dermot Musgrove <dermot glade perl connectfree co uk>]

Kent Schumacher wrote:

[...]
> Could there be such a thing as a compiled indexed XML file that could
> be compiled (or decompiled) using separate programs (much like tar
> operates).
> 
> Programs could load specific tagged items via a call that supplies
> an arg list of tags to be retrieved.  The call would have the responsiblity
> of determining if the file was XML or compiled and behave appropriately.
> 
> Then you could get the efficiency of binary indexed files and not give
> up the ubiquity of XML files.  The user could choose which he preferred
> on a file by file basis.
Hi, please ignore me if I am speaking out of turn here but...

If gnumeric can handle .gz files maybe it could handle .tar.gz files as well.
Couldn't a (gzipped) tarball contain images, XML, po files and  so on for
easy (and standard) retrieval?

The tarball could be released as a chunk of resources but we could all get 
at the data within if we wanted to use the program's resources without 
(re)inventing any more 'proprietory' file formats. 

I am not a C programmer so I don't know what problems this would cause for
C programs - please ignore me if I am talking rubbish - but it seems a shame
not to leverage existing code.

Just my 0.02 euro

Dermot