[Monotone-devel] Re: silly question #2: why base64?

[Bruce Stephens]

Lapo Luchini <address@hidden> writes:

> Isn't sqlite supposed to be binary-safe?
> Well, except from \0, AFAIR, but shouldn't avoiding that be way faster
> and smaller than full base64?

I think the plan is to use BLOBs at some point.  I don't know why it
wasn't done that way to begin with; maybe sqlite didn't support them,
or the API was sufficiently annoying, or there were odd restrictions,
or maybe it was simply convenience (if all your data is ASCII, then
it's easier to mess about with).

I don't think there's any deep significance to the use of base64.  At
one point there was a branch which removed it (in favour of BLOBs, I
think), but I'm not sure what the status of it is.