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Linux, meet the RegistryLinux, meet the RegistryPosted Mar 13, 2009 5:32 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753)In reply to: Linux, meet the Registry by bojan Parent article: ext4 and data loss > Binary is not necessarily evil as people seem to think. Yeah, tell that to people with corrupt Windows registry. The binary/text distinction is rather illusory. Text is simply a binary file that uses a subset of byte values to represent data, and certain values as delimiters. What really matters is how a file format is structured. A binary file can be organized so that recovering data from it is possible (what does fsck(8) really do? Fix corruption in a complex binary file, with the constraint that the operation must be done in-place).
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Linux, meet the Registry Posted Mar 13, 2009 5:56 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
> The binary/text distinction is rather illusory.
Yeah. I edit SQLite files in vi all the time ;-)
Illusory? Posted Mar 13, 2009 13:14 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] The binary/text distinction is not illusory; it is a cognitive issue. Limiting file contents to printable characters (not just byte values since you can use multi-byte characters) makes people be able to edit them. Text files do not usually contain just random characters; they contain readable words that can be understood and documented rather easily.The machine doesn't care, true, but to people there is a big difference between a sequence of random byte values and a sequence of written words. Just as, to me personally, there is a big difference between a text in Spanish and a set of cyrillic Russian words.
Linux, meet the Registry Posted Mar 19, 2009 9:31 UTC (Thu) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]
[[ The binary/text distinction is rather illusory. ]]
For computers yes, for human this is very different, that's the point!
If you have a corrupted binary, it's very, very difficult for an human to fix it (unless there's a tool which fix it "auto-magically"), whereas for a text there is still the possibility for the human to fix it.
A FS is a database, fsck is the tool to fix it (up to a point), if you add other databases in a FS this add the possibility of additional errors fixable only by the tools, with structured text files (JSON is nice: easy to read and to parse) you have the best of both worlds.
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