[mkgmap-dev] Binary format update

Thu Sep 16 15:36:05 BST 2010

Hi

The changes to read Scott Crosby's binary format are complete (for
mkgmap itself) and I will merge them back soon.

Before that it would be good for as many people as possible to try
it out on their existing XML files, with the options that they
normally use, since the code has been completely restructured.

I've run a number of test that show that the results exactly the same
between the new and current trunk version of mkgmap.

I'm not so worried about testing the binary input, since it is new and
won't affect anyone if there are bugs.  It won't be that useful until
splitter is able to output the format directly anyway.

The amount of code required for the new format was very small once the
existing code was restructured though and seem to work very well.

The found actual time to read the file was cut in about half, however
the time to read the input file is now a small percentage of the
total run time of mkgmap, so the overall speed increase is small.
The main benefit will be with the splitter and the disk space
requirements.

..Steve