Re:What If OpenDocument Used SQLite?
by Santosh83 on Thursday November 02, 2017 @09:38AM
(#15610266)
In the event of catastrophic loss of human knowledge to the scale that it makes it difficult or impossible to recreate a ZIP or SQLite driver, I would presume that maintaining the replacing the hardware on which XML/text files are stored would be an even bigger problem. Catastrophic collapse of civilization IMO would pretty much doom all our digital knowledge. Only books can survive such an event.
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You don't need a catastrophic loss of human knowledge for this to be a problem. Running a piece of software written in the 80s, even with the source code available, can be quite a challenge. Support for some features of the current SQLite format might deprecated, then removed, over the next many versions. Or perhaps a subtle bug is introduced that renders certain ancient versions unreadable (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15531489) and sticks around for long enough that you end up in a situation where you need to invest very significantly in software archaeology.
> Support for some features of the current SQLite format might deprecated, then removed, over the next many versions. Or perhaps a subtle bug is introduced that renders certain ancient versions unreadable (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15531489) and sticks around for long enough that you end up in a situation where you need to invest very significantly in software archaeology.
At this point, you've side-tracked into an argument that anyone could make against any software.
Bingo. Which is why it's a quality not to have dependencies on any specific software when designing a format for longevity. XML has an absolute minimum of such dependencies, Open Document has only zip added to the mix, which is a format with tons of different and independent implementations, plenty of documentation for how to implement it - on top of being a fairly simple format to begin with.
SQLite for all it's significant qualities are none of that, and thus you shouldn't use it if designing for file format longevity.