On 19/02/2015 02:13, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
Chris Angelico wrote:
SQLite misses some important features that makes it better suited as a
simple datastore, not much unlike shelve. And network use is not one
of them, since you can actually implement concurrent sqlite access by
coding an intermediate layer. Assuming of course we are talking about
a small number of concurrent users.
This is what I was saying: it's fine for purposes like Firefox's
bookmarks and settings and such (which I think was what it was
originally developed for?). Not so fine over a network.
The sheer number of Firefox bugs related to its use of SQLite says
different.
Once upon a time, Firefox's config, bookmarks, etc. were stored in plain
text files. At worst they were HTML. You could trivially read them, copy
them, restore them and even (if you were careful) edit them using the text
editor of your choice. Many a time I was on one machine, wanted to know a
bookmark from another machine, so I would ssh across to the other machine
and run grep over the bookmark file.
No more. Firefox still keeps a bookmark HTML file, but it never seems to be
synced with the actual bookmarks. Settings are stored in an opaque blob,
rather than human-readable text, limiting what you can do with it. It's very
nice that Firefox offers about:config but not so nice that you can't do the
same thing without the GUI running.
If Firefox crashes, there are failure modes where it can no longer read your
bookmarks, or keep history. I don't mean that history won't persist across
restarts, I mean that *within a single session* it cannot remember what page
you came from so you can hit the Back button and return to it. WTF?
I swear, if not for the fact that every single other browser is worse, I
would dump Firefox in a second.
After a wonderful relationship lasting many happy years I dumped Firefox
a few weeks ago for Chrome. A few anxious moments gave me pause for
thought, but overall I'm happy to have changed. However is anybody
aware of a "new kid on the block" that could take over as I'd happily
switch again? Nothing has sprung out at me, hence the choice I made.
--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.
Mark Lawrence
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