[rrd-developers] a portable rrd format

[Alex van den Bogaerdt]

On Wed, Jun 20, 2007 at 10:26:31PM +0200, Tobias Oetiker wrote:

> * Rolling our own should not be all that difficult.
> 
> I have created a little writeup on
> 
> http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool-trac/wiki/PortableRrdFormat

A couple of random thoughts:

Is there really a need to convert NaNs to the local architecture or
will processors deal with different but correct types?
I'm not talking endianness here; I'm talking about 0x7ff400...
vs. 0x7ff800... vs 0x7ff00...1 and so on.

Should there be a flag (or similar) to decide wether to convert
a database to/from the independant format, and otherwise work with
the local format (optimize for speed)?
-a- creating a database: in which format
-b- updating a database in a wrong format: write back
    -b1- in native format (whole database, obviously)
    -b2- in independant format (whole database, obviously)
    -b3- in the same format (just the relevant part, of all?)

Should there be some compromise (another flag): use the system's
endianness but be compatible in every other fashion; meaning always
use the same size of data?

Is using floating point really the best option?  You are aware
that 10 times 0.1 is not 1, right?


cheers,
Alex