LUA files being human readable is important for transparency in the addon community. It’s important because it allows easier understanding including fixes of the addons and their data by players with a smidge of knowledge. It keeps people honest. Especially when dealing with a community that includes addons that have separate executable programs that read them and upload the contents to websites I think transparency is a critically important goal.
Given the fact players including addon authors come and go there are addons that end up permanently abandoned but which players can help limp on for years as well as addons that are simply abandoned for an expac when an addon author quits.
It’s well and good for a major addon project like ATT to suggest this, it has multiple authors, contributors, a huge discord community, it’s not going anywhere regardless of one person’s feelings about the next expac.
With the advent of SSDs as standard for running the game off of the penalty for running even a very large amount of large addons (as I do and have done for years) is mitigated significantly. Very fast RAM also being standard and fast processors mean the impact from white-space isn’t nothing but it’s also not what it once was and grows less and less important with time IMO.
For many years I ran Auctioneer and the saved variables files from that were double digit megabyte in size (my auc-stat-histogram.lua file is 14mb for instance and that’s just one module). So believe me I’ve experienced what bad load times can be when I used to run WoW off a spinning disk back in the day with big addons. Disabling my addons dramatically changed my load times back then. Now it still does to a degree but it’s a matter of shaving off 5 seconds on login which isn’t that much.
Now I do think Blizzard could do much more to optimize things and they should. They haven’t really touched the addon system other than tossing on restrictions, the occasion new variable and lots and lots of seemingly random variable name changes that come whimsically.
One additional thing on a personal note. I like keeping backups. I do this using 7zip on ultra compression. Doing so I can take my WTF folder from 600MB in size to 30MB in size. If white-space were to be removed it makes going back into my back-ups to pull some data out a lot more painful without a stand-alone tool to re-add white-space (admittedly there might be an IDE that can do that for lua but I’ve never used anything but NPP for it with highlighting) but it’s a concern which is why I’d want easy control over it.
A toc setting is not a good solution as it is not something that most users could maintain for themselves.
It would take the power out of the hands of the user and put it in the addon author’s hands. Every addon update (and many people use programs to automate updates so aren’t even in control of that and wouldn’t be aware) would overwrite such a preference if set by the user. If one runs only 6 addons sure it’s not a huge deal though there will be times after automated addon updates that the files will inevitably be made human unreadable. But for someone like me and I suspect others who runs over 200 addons (in terms of ToC files, many are modules of larger addons obviously like DBM) it becomes unmanageable.
So instead if we must do this I propose an option be added in-game which globally sets or disables this according to player preference and which the game uses when writing the data to have or remove white-space
(Though I’m predicting it now, if they add this, hold-outs like me will be so small in number I predict within two expacs the option to go back to white-space will be removed entirely as a tiny but unacceptable additional maintenance burden)
Thank goodness.
I hate minification. Malware authors love it, proprietary software that tries to obfuscate how it works loves it. People who love to take control away from the user love it. Advocates of open and free software do not like it and for good reason.
