UDDF

[Linus Torvalds]

On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 2:46 PM, Henrik Brautaset Aronsen
<subsurface at henrik.synth.no> wrote:
>
> There's no doubt about that, and the legacy from UDCF isn't a good one. I
> thought it would be nice to promote a common divelog format, but UDDF just
> might not be worth promoting.  Proper UDDF import/export is good enough.

We have some kind of import from it, but no export. And I have to
admit that the import is kind of limited too - I checked a few of the
example UDDF files and made sure that we imported the core data from
them, but the ones I found didn't have things like tank pressure
information etc, so it's *really* limited.

Btw, the UDDF (and other dive log export formats, for that matter)
brokenness goes deeper than just "ugly" and "no sane unit
information". The UDDF format seems to think that "gas mix" is somehow
separate from "cylinder information", which is just totally insane at
a very fundamental level. You *cannot* have a gas mix without a
cylinder. Anybody who designs a format where gasmix information is
separate from cylinder information is simply incompetent. It's wrong.
The only gasmix that exists outside of a cylinder is "air" - the rest
is all per-cylinder.

So the whole format is fundamentally misdesigned. It's completely
crazy. It also has tons of crap in it - defined tags for "crutaceans"
and passport information for your buddies etc. Anybody who thinks that
is a good idea is just totally out to lunch.

Quite frankly, UDDF is my *least* favorite format out there. And
that's saying a lot - it includes the crazy diving log format that
uses different units for pressure for tanks and for samples. UDDF at
least has well-defined units, even if they are not actually explicit
and are totally crazy ("cubic meter" for tank volume - that's some
seriously stupid choice right there, and somebody looked more at SI
units than at sanity). But UDDF is a perfect example of "made by
engineers, made for nobody sane".

So I'm not even all that interested in exporting into it. It shouldn't
be all that hard, but it doesn't seem to be *worth* it. Nobody sane
actually uses UDDF.

                                     Linus