On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 11:12 PM, Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti <r.lucchetti@univpm.it> wrote:

On Thu, 16 Jan 2014, Allin Cottrell wrote:

Here's the "RFC" I promised in response to Sven's posting at
http://lists.wfu.edu/pipermail/gretl-devel/2014-January/004867.html

[...]

This little story (which admits several variations on the same theme) is perhaps a bit stretched here and there; and sure, there is some carelessness involved, but losing all the data for a project out of one or two silly moves is unacceptable. IMO, there should be some mechanism by which the potential for confuson is kept at a minimum. The openoffice format, for example, is a zip file containing several xml files. How about something similar? "Foo.bdt" may be a zip file containing pre-defined xml files: "data.gdt" (perhaps containing some additional metadata) and "data.bin" (the binary blob); we could use a "light" compression level so to preserve decent speed when reading and writing.

I totally agree with this solution, a zipped file containing metadata and data .gdt Xor .bin. Gretl could use the same file gdt extension for the package, even could include, for example, info about the binary content like MD5 checksum (which is a time consuming operation but you may consider if it is needed).

Helio