How popular should a file format be, to be added here?

[Luapulu]

I have a loader package for a format used in a little corner of physics. I'd guess there might be tens of people using this format at most. Nonetheless, I've followed FileIO conventions while writing it so I could easily add it here.

How popular should a file format be, to be added here?

[timholy]

My view: if it has nontrivial magic bytes, it's presumably unique so it won't get in the way of anything else. In that case, add it without hesitation.

If there are no magic bytes, and if the extension is not unique or is too short to be plausibly unique, then popularity becomes an important consideration.

[Luapulu]

There aren't magic bytes but every line ends in "physiDet" and the first line has to contain three integers. (It's a human readable delimited-ish format) The ending is ".root.hits" so conceivably there may be some other simulation / data analysis software based on ROOT, that saves to a ".root.hits" file format.

Example

[timholy]

Interesting. 👍 for it being easily recognizable. 👎 for the fact that it needs a custom detector, and the more of those we have to run the slower the general thing becomes. hits seems like a pretty unique extension, though. I forget (and don't have time to check) if we only run detectors on extensions that match.

[Luapulu]

src/query.jl#L72-L90 seems to suggest, that if only one format exists for an extension and it has no magic bytes, it will get loaded as is without further checking.

[Luapulu]

Ok, quick correction on my specific file format: The line ending may be different. First line still has three integers, but following lines may vary in terms of the ending string. For my use case this hasn't made a difference, but if this is to be added here I'd have to generalise my code first.

I'll let things mature a bit and may be come back to this later if makes sense to add rarely used formats here.