hal draft spec

[Havoc Pennington]

On Wed, 2003-09-10 at 19:00, George wrote:
> > This should be easy to parse. It's probably pretty inefficient too in
> > terms of storage and driver searching cost due to the quite simple
> > format yielding many drivers :-) 
> 
> That's just the ondisk format, that can be inefficient.  Plus I doubt
> you'll notice unless there's way too many entries.

There's also a well-known solution to slow on disk formats, which is to
have a cache in "compiled" form. (see fontconfig, ldconfig, etc.)
So no huge worries there.

XML makes a lot of sense for the format in my view, anything else and
you end up with a mess. cf. .desktop files, I'm still not sure we have
the format semantics precisely defined...

Havoc