On 11/28/06, Craig Morrison <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
P Kishor wrote:
> On 11/28/06, John Stanton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> If you use an extension greater than 3 chars you violate rules for some
>> existing file systems and reduce portability. You can also make it
>> difficult to parse the extension when it is used to type the file.
>
> we are going a bit off-thread here, but violating the file system rule
> (in this case, Windows) is precisely why I use an extension greater
> that 3 chars. For example, .db extension is used by several other
> programs -- Windows itself uses .db extension for thumbnails it
> generates for pictures inside a folder. I want to get above that
> riff-raff. The stupid system just lists my databases as "SQLITE File."
> Good enough for me.
>
> As far as portability is concerned -- my world revolves around Unixes,
> in particular Mac OS X, some Linux variants, and Windows. I have never
> had any portability issues with foo.sqlite.
>
>>
>> In medecine the Hippocratic Oath requires "First, do no harm". Not a
>> bad principle for IT design also.
>
> I think, in good health, the first principle should be, don't expose
> yourself to ills. By making my extension illegible to anything but
> SQLite, I am not even getting in the fray.
Since we're already off-topic. :-D
I'm sure you are already aware of this, just pointing it out in context
so those that aren't have a heads up.
Just a bit of warning, as it has bitten a few in the bum, about >3
character extensions under the NT+ variants.. They can and will bite
you, for instance:
dir *.sql
Will list not only *.sql files, but *.sqlite too.
Imagine:
del *.sql
Deleting all your *.sqlite files. Whoopsie..
fair warning, but totally pointless --
'del *.s*' will delete all your sql files as well, and so will 'del
*.??l*' and and host of other variations. There are many ways of
harming oneself, but picking on arbitrarily long extensions as a
particularly dangerous one is baseless, afaik.
Recently, I read somewhere (forget the link... should be easy to
search for) -- apparently some file extensions are registered within
Windows as special files that need to be indexed on every change. One
of those extensions is '.dbd' (I could be wrong about the particular
extension... but, for the sake of argument, let's just assume it is
'.dbd'). So, every time your database changes even a little bit, the
OS wants to index it... this person who discovered this phenomenon,
claimed it was causing a performance bottleneck.
Whether or not this is true, the fact is, in Windows (and even in Mac
OS X, while using the Finder), three letter extensions mean something
special. By making it '.sqlite' (or '.bobbitybob', for that matter), I
hope to make my db immune from all this. Actually, even better might
be not having any extension at all.
--
Puneet Kishor http://punkish.eidesis.org/
Nelson Inst. for Env. Studies, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu/
Open Source Geospatial Foundation https://edu.osgeo.org/
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