Re: Bug File Format

[Rob Browning]

Marius Vollmer <address@hidden> writes:

> Yes, I thought about this, too.  But s-expression just feel
> unnatural for non-nested data that is mostly straight text.  I think
> that most information about a bug is in the body of the 'message',
> and having to write this as a Scheme string will be annoying.

I agree -- this seems like a good idea at first glance, but unless we
have some good wrapping algorithms, and some fancy emacs macros,
typing the main body information associated with a bug seems like it
might be a PITA.  It'll also be hard to easily append emails/patches,
etc., since they'd all need to be properly quoted.  I suppose we might
be able to get by with sexps for the header fields, but I don't feel
strongly about this either way.

However, I do feel like if we find ourselves trying to define anything
very complex at all wrt quoting/escaping, etc., then we need to
revisit this issue more seriously.  As you point out, as far as
parsers go, "We've already got one."

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org, @linuxdevel.com, and @debian.org
Previously @cs.utexas.edu
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