General purpose library for name/value pairs.

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

On Jul 20, 2013, at 12:19 AM, Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des at des.no> wrote:

> He's not reinventing anything.  He's implementing Solaris's nvpair API,
> which includes serialization - in fact, ZFS's on-disk format is based on
> serialized nvlists.

Well, OK, perhaps "reinventing" was the wrong word, though if he's "reimplementing" the nvlist part of Solaris's nvpairs then it sounds like he just needs to finish the reimplementation since there's still no serialization.   Either that or start over / mutate it, since the more I look at http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/821-1469/nvpair-name-3nvpair.html the more I go "wow, this looks really bare-metal in its approach to, well, everything!"

I'm also not in love with Apple's Property List APIs or mechanism, they're just what I'm familiar with and, as you and others have pointed out, everyone and their dog seems to have gone down the same road at some point with nvpair, libprop (NetBSD) and probably at least a few others we're missing.   I looked at libprop and it actually looks pretty decent.

- Jordan