Roll Your Own Filesystem

Antipattern

Causes:

• Pride

Driving Forces:

• Windows has historically had poor archiving libraries.
• Littering the filesystem with hundreds of tiny files is not really a good idea.
• ZIP imposes both structure and compression, which may not be what you want.
• The tried-and-true UNIX archive formats usually have odd issues on Windows and aren't seekable if compressed.
• Insufficient filesystem support for metadata other than a couple of dates and a few flags.

Description: A custom written file format for storing other files.

Examples: Most videogames.

Variants:

• The renamed zip file. (docx, new fla, swc, xlsx)
  • This is not actually a bad idea -- document should be one file so it's not split by copying.
• Sometimes happens recursively.

Avoiding the antipattern:

• YouArentGonnaNeedIt

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Littering the filesystem with hundreds of tiny files is not really a good idea

This really depends greatly on the filesystem. As noted in InterNetNews?: Usenet Transport for Internet Sites, by Rich Salz, (http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/sa92/salz.pdf) it depends greatly on how you operate on the filesystem, and to some extent on the filesystem design. There are now many choices for filesystems that are optimized for rapid open/read/close of many tiny files.

Yeah, but the OS and Applications filesystem (remember most examples are Windows) isn't that.

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CategoryAntiPattern CategoryDevelopmentAntiPattern