For those who get blocked by gnu.org with a 403 (older Firefox) or an even sillier "Too Many Requests" error (older Safari) need to override their user agents strings to "curl" to make the site load again.
I love recutils. The database format is simple enough, it has a bunch of options for constraints, and it has Bash integration and a great Emacs mode to search, edit and verify the integrity of the database.
Sure, it's not as fast as SQLite or bigger systems, but often it's enough for smaller projects.
On the topic of plain text databases, I have been playing around with wordnet(basically the backbone data structure of a thesaurus ) and while there are a lot of perfectly good libraries to handle the data I was having fun building my own. One interesting thing is that the original data format has the byte offset of every record and link baked into the data, this makes it trivial to avoid having to load the whole thing into memory and you can directly seek to the record in question thus making it a plain text database. Admittedly one only good for reading as writes would have to rebuild all the indexes.
Honestly now days the whole thing can be trivially loaded into memory but back when the project was started this was much more of a concern, I do know that once I figured this out I started re writing my program to see how little memory I could use, It was a lot of fun to use access patterns other than "load the whole thing into memory"
Have a look at cdb. The more you read about its simplistic design the more you realize it is damn near the perfect solution for static and semi-static datasets. Fetches are either 1 or 2 disk reads depending on if the key exists.
As a similar, yet more powerful data format I started using Nickel (https://nickel-lang.org). It has very sophisticated typing and transformation features. Highly recommended!
In the AI era, the rec file seems to be a great choice for formatting text that will be feed into LLMs. Imagine converting an HTML table into a RAG file, the context will be much clearer.
I like plaintext database files, and this looks way more readable than csv. But what I'd find even more interesting than improved readability would be features like atomicity. There are many tools for joins and other basic operations on tables stored in various text formats, but the real gap to 'proper' databases are ACID properties.
It's a bummer that the library and utilities are GPLv3 - really limits adoption, because it means that product developers can't build it into the kinds of small embedded Linux systems where it would really shine.
Have you tried reaching out to enquire if you could buy a version that was at least LGPL or proprietary licenced for you to bundle in your closed source application?
Or was this just a statement about being entitled to other peoples work and closing it up?
> product developers can't build it into the kinds of small embedded Linux systems
Are you sure about that? Because if you don't ship binaries, but whole devices, than only AGPL might demand what you think GPL does. Also I don't see what the issue is with "distributing" software from somebody else. If you designed things modular, the GPL software can be updated without the user needing to touch any of your proprietary code.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 42.7 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31832564 155 points, 52 comments, 3 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15302035 105 points, 46 comments, 8 years ago
I really enjoying the toolset to query logs etc...
Good memories.
Sure, it's not as fast as SQLite or bigger systems, but often it's enough for smaller projects.
Amazingly poor choice of logo.
https://wordnet.princeton.edu/documentation/wndb5wn
Honestly now days the whole thing can be trivially loaded into memory but back when the project was started this was much more of a concern, I do know that once I figured this out I started re writing my program to see how little memory I could use, It was a lot of fun to use access patterns other than "load the whole thing into memory"
https://cdb.cr.yp.to/
With recutils recsel | recfmt -f template.fodt I have my invoices.
soffice and curl to generate .pdf s and email them off.
With recutils recset I have my invoices status updated. Done.
In the AI era, the rec file seems to be a great choice for formatting text that will be feed into LLMs. Imagine converting an HTML table into a RAG file, the context will be much clearer.
Or was this just a statement about being entitled to other peoples work and closing it up?
Are you sure about that? Because if you don't ship binaries, but whole devices, than only AGPL might demand what you think GPL does. Also I don't see what the issue is with "distributing" software from somebody else. If you designed things modular, the GPL software can be updated without the user needing to touch any of your proprietary code.