On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 01:08:03PM +0100, Alex Bligh wrote: > It occurred to me that we are reinventing the wheel with this a bit. > Parsing options and lengths and so forth is error-prone, and is likely > to result in interoperability difficulties.
Possibly. > Extensible languages for describing options already exist. For a local > hack here, I thought about passing the disk name an XML blob - this > would allow me to pass the disk name and all sorts of other options > right from the client without any new client-side coding. It then > occurred to me that if the client passed what it wanted in an XML > blob (including the disk name), perhaps with the server sending some > XML at some stage too, perhaps this would be an easy way out of > the extensibility issue. I don't think so. XML is very much overrated, IMO. A plain and simple byte-based protocol can do just as much, though we wouldn't be (ancient)buzzword compliant anymore then. > libxml is pretty easy to use, and as the xml goes through only at > mount time, it's hardly speed critical. No, but nbd-client is space critical. While I don't mind adding libraries to the server if it helps, it is absolutely necessary that nbd-client can still be stored in an initramfs without too much of a problem and without too much ram on the client. Adding a library that is 10 times the size of the binary itself is therefore a no-go. Anyway, you do what you want to, but there's not going to be any XML in the official nbd-client. -- The volume of a pizza of thickness a and radius z can be described by the following formula: pi zz a ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ BlackBerry® DevCon Americas, Oct. 18-20, San Francisco, CA The must-attend event for mobile developers. Connect with experts. Get tools for creating Super Apps. See the latest technologies. Sessions, hands-on labs, demos & much more. Register early & save! http://p.sf.net/sfu/rim-blackberry-1 _______________________________________________ Nbd-general mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nbd-general
