Re: [bug-recutils] Deprecate recinf ?

[Jose E. Marchesi]

         > It seems to me, that recinf is almost redundant.
         >
         > The few things it can do, that recsel cannot could be quite easily
         > fixed I think.
         
         I haven't thought that recsel can be used for it (I use it to access
         records, not record set data like descriptors).  SQL systems have
         separate commands to show the table schemas, recinf might have a 
similar
         purpose.
    
    the SQL language itself has a different syntax, but (at least in the case of
    Postgres) there is no fundamental internal difference between the data and 
the 
    meta-data.

Same with recutils: the descriptors are just records having some special
fields.
         
         Both tools have largely different implementation and recinf could be
         easily extended to use an index file without reading any non-descriptor
         records from the recfile (recsel would need much special-casing to not
         do a query and use the same code as recinf).
    
    I'm not familiar with the code, but aren't descriptors just a record set?
    
    So one could allow the descriptors to be retrieved with a call like
    recsel --type=% <file> 
    or similar.

That is a nice idea.  But that feature would replace the functionality
currently implemented by recinf.

Moreover, recinf is its present form is still pretty simple, but the
original idea was to extend it to provide more useful global information
about the database.  Things like accessing the list of types defined in
the file.

-- 
Jose E. Marchesi         http://www.jemarch.net
GNU Project              http://www.gnu.org