Re: How do you best store structured data in git repositories?

From: David Aguilar <davvid@gmail.com>
Date: Dec 8, 2009, 07:14 UTC
Message-ID: <20091208071356.GA4970@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <1260220821.3545.12.camel@nord26-amd64>

On Mon, Dec 07, 2009 at 10:20:21PM +0100, Sebastian Setzer wrote:

Show 23 quoted lines

> On Thursday, Dec 03 2009 at 16:14 -0800, David Aguilar wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 02, 2009 at 04:17:10PM -0500, Avery Pennarun wrote:
> > > On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 4:08 PM, Sebastian Setzer
> > > <sebastianspublicaddress@googlemail.com> wrote:
> > > > Do you use XML for this purpose?
> > > 
> > > XML is terrible for most data storage purposes.
> > 
> > I agree 100%.
> > 
> > JSON's not too bad for data structures and is known to
> > be friendly to XML expats.
> > 
> Sorry, I didn't want to start a flamewar against XML. I'm no big friend
> of XML myself, but I don't know of an (open source) diff-/merge tool for
> any general purpose file format other than XML or plain text.
> When you mention other formats, I'd be interested in
>   - why this format is good for storage in git
>   - if there are merge tools available which ensure that, after a merge,
> the structure (and maybe additional contraints) is still valid.
> 
> Thanks for your comments,
> Sebastian

Sorry, didn't mean to sound xml-flaming. The only reason for mentioning json, yaml, etc. is that they're good data structure formats. They're all plain text formats, so you can use existing diff/merge tools.

I guess none of this has much to do with git aside from being able to write custom merge drivers to operate on them as data.

If there's a diff/merge tool for xml that works well then hooking it up to git-{diff,merge}tool might be something to try too.

-- 
		David