Study change of Metadata format

We've started to refactor Metadata and MetadataProperty, in a previous version, to avoid the use of complex ical format for metadata files. We would like to use a more efficient parser (in C ?):

for better performances
to simplify maintainability of code
to use more standard format One of the solution would be to use GLib.KeyFile() format

from gi.repository import GLib

N = 20000

metadata_str = """
[default]
String=mystr
Bool=true
Int=300
Double=0.0
"""

for i in range(N):
    a = GLib.KeyFile()
    a.load_from_data(metadata_str, len(metadata_str), GLib.KeyFileFlags.NONE)
    a.get_value('default', 'String')
    a.set_string_list('default', 'multiple', ['1', '2', '3'])
    a.set_locale_string('default', 'title', 'fr', u'Hello')
    a.set_locale_string('default', 'title', 'en', u'Hello')
    a.save_to_file('/tmp/%s.metadata' % i)
    a.to_data()

for i in range(N):
    a = GLib.KeyFile()
    a.load_from_file('/tmp/%s.metadata' % i, GLib.KeyFileFlags.NONE)
    a.to_data()

Some remarks:

We should benchmark advantages in term of performances of this change
Maybe it would be better to avoid use of Property in Metadata to simplify API (there's bugs, for example to compare 2 Properties before a resource.set_value('name', Property).
- We would like to add a version to Metadata 1, 2,.... to be compatible with old versions, and migrate gradually.

hforge / itools

Study change of Metadata format #97