On Wed, 2002-04-03 at 08:54, Derek Atkins wrote: > Note that this will not only fail to do what you want, but could leave > your data file unreadable and unusable. This is _EXACTLY_ the kind of > thing that we DON'T want people to be doing! If you want to change > your data you should use the application to do it.
Extremely Strongly Disagree. I think it's a fundamental part of the Unix and free software philosophy that the data belongs to the user, not to the application. "It's none of your d**n business what I do with my data!" If the user wants to pipe their data through perl or sed or whatnot that's their business. That's the main reason *I* wanted to go to the XML format to start with. People *hate* applications that bottle their data up in opaque formats. Databases get a special exemption because of the extremely delicate nature of the interrelationships between bits of data, but all real dbs have a way to dump text (SQL) that can be used to exactly restore the db. Not just a text "export" (which is usually lossy) but a dump which exposes all of the data's guts. Sure, it's ill-advised to make precipitous changes to your XML data file, but it's also ill-advised to make precipitous changes to the kernel source code... does that mean it shouldn't be available for easy editing? b.g. _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gnucash.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
