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> internally uses JSON text format for metadata. What the hell? Why would they do this? The only (tenuous) justification for using a parsed human-oriented text
by wyager 9y ago
> internally uses JSON text format for metadata.
What the hell? Why would they do this? The only (tenuous) justification for using a parsed human-oriented text format in any protocol is so that humans can edit things by hand, but this will presumably not be the case for file metadata.
I don’t want to read too much into this since there might be a sane explanation, but this seriously makes me question the design of this security-critical system.
- freedomben 9y agoJSON is a language agnostic format that is widely supported, so one could read/parse the metadata from virtually any language. This is much more flexible and powerful than a specific binary format. It may also make debugging a lot easier since it is human readable. I don't know if that's the reason they chose JSON, but that's what I would think about IIWM.
- wyager 9y ago> so one could read/parse the metadata from virtually any language. This isn’t a use case for file system metadata. It only makes sense internally anyway. People interact with filesystem metadata through standardized APIs, not metadata dumps. > It may also make debugging a lot easier since it is human readable. It’s also basically guaranteed to introduce a ton of bugs; parsing and generating JSON is orders of magnitude more complicated than generating and reading an unambiguous tagged binary format.