Storage format for serialized data

[borekb]

Currently, we store serialized data as they are, i.e., serialized. For example, this is how we store the active_plugins option:

[active_plugins]
option_value = "a:1:{i:0;s:29:\"versionpress/versionpress.php\";}"
autoload = "yes"

This was simple to implement but degrades the data inside serialized arrays / objects to something that cannot easily be ignored (#607), diffed, will cause merge conflicts, etc. WordPress, and especially some plugins, heavily use serialized data so we really need to support this better.

One initial idea is to convert the serialized data into some INI subset that would be hierarchical and friendly to diffing. For example, the above could be stored as something like:

[active_plugins]
option_value = <<serialized>>
option_value.0 = versionpress/versionpress.php
autoload = "yes"

If the first index contained an object with properties a and b, the keys would be something like:

option_value.0.a = ...
option_value.0.b = ...

Etc. This is pseudocode, I haven't put much thought into the format yet.

[borekb]

Moving this to 3.0 where it feels more at home. Let's see if it can make it to the release as it's quite late in the release cycle.. but I have no doubts @JanVoracek :)

[JanVoracek]

Reopening. DB rows containing string false are missing after re-saving entity.