Re: persistent data feature

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > > Many users will not store large amounts of data, and a textual file
  > > would be much less risk-prone than any other method.

  > There will, of course, be large amounts of data, and that will be slow.

I can't understand that sentence.  You seem to be claiming that every
user will have a large amount of data to save.  I don't think I will.

  > > If we decide also to implement the feature of sqlite3 database access,
  > > we could offer the option of storing persistent Lisp data in such a
  > > database.  Users should be able to choose one storage format or the
  > > other for each database.

  > You'll get a slower and messier interface.

I don't think it will be either slower or messier
due to offering the choice.  It will need one global variable
to specify which method of storage.  Each method ought to be
as fast as if it were the only method.

                                                If you're (optionally)
  > storing the data in different data files, which ones has precedence?

What does "precedence" mean here?  I think I have lost you.

  > Offering a number of backend storage options is just needlessly
  > complicating things, and we'll end up with a big non-performant mess, as
  > usual in Emacs.

That is too general to be convincing.

  > For this feature to be attractive, there's a bunch of performance issues
  > and features that have to be present,

Without details, that seems to be handwaving.  All I can say is,
you have not demonstrated your claim.

                                          and they will be in my
  > implementation, based on storing using sqlite3.  I won't be adding any
  > other backends for this.

Before including this feature in master we should make sure both back-ends
are working.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)