[Sugar-devel] [RFC] Better disk format for journal entries

[Michael Stone]

Folks,

I've longed, for quite some time, for an encoding of Sugar's journal entries
that is more amenable to manipulation with standard Linux tools and APIs. I've
also longed for a format that is friendly to rainbow and which can encode both
the data necessary for today's journal as well as the data necessary for Eben's
Journal redesign mockups.

A few days ago, I wrote a little bit about what I think such a format might
look like over here:

   http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2010-June/024908.html

Unfortunately, this note didn't generate much of a response -- thus, to whet
your appetite further, here's a (rough!) exporter from today's DS into the
format sketched in that note, available both in the the patch following this
note and in my combined sugar git repo [1] in the "xos" branch. 

Already, I find it helpful both for browsing my DS with filesystem tools and
for resuming activities from the Terminal. 

What cool things can you think of to do with it?

Regards,

Michael

[1]: Links to my sugar git repo:

    http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/mstone/sugar/commit/?h=xos
    http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/mstone/sugar/snapshot/sugar-xos.tar.gz
    git://dev.laptop.org/users/mstone/sugar