[vorbis] vorbiscomment and multi line comments

[John Morton]

On Friday 03 October 2003 01:20, you wrote:
>  > Fair enough. I'll indent multi-line comments in my text serializing
>  > scheme with '~', seeing as ascii 0x7E appears to be outside the
>  > range allowed for field names.
>
>  Kludge alert! Kludge alert!
>
>  Why not introduce a change to the comment scheme that allows for
>  encoding of arbitrary characters through an escape character?  E.g.,
>  "\xYY" where "YY" is the UTF-8 code in hex and maybe "\xxYYYY" for
>  UTF-16.

What problem is this solving? Comment values are already UTF-8. Doing 
something special to enter the unusual/interesting characters isn't a problem
for the format to solve.

>  Yeah, it would technically break backwards compatibility, but there's
>  no use crying over spilt milk: any commenting scheme that cannot
>  encode arbitrary characters for values demonstrates an unacceptable
>  lack of planning and should be fixed while it's still possible to do
>  so.  Furthermore, I'd suspect very few comments so far contain
>  "\xYY".  Finally, you're already breaking backwards compatibility with
>  this tilde proposal, so why break it in a *useful* way?

I'm only 'breaking' the ability to feed such a text file into vorbiscomment, 
which is no biggy, seeing as mutli line comments don't work via the pipe 
_now_.

>  Please, do it the right way.  Don't add some nasty kludge that will
>  wind up being woefully inadequate going forward.  Take it from a
>  professional software architect: do it the right way the first time,
>  and there will be much less pain going forward.

It's an implementation kludge, and only in the vorbiscomment implementation, 
at that, and only for one case. 

Besides, I probably won't bother, as the code I'm writing removes the need 
for me to use vorbiscomment at all, so I don't really need to write out 
vorbiscomment 'compatable' files, anyway.

John
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