Rob Pike was interviewed by Slashdot today. His replies to questions are extremely clear and lucid. And thought provoking.

One of the big insights in the last few years, through work by the internet search engines but also tools like Udi Manber's glimpse, is that data with no meaningful structure can still be very powerful if the tools to help you search the data are good. In fact, structure can be bad if the structure you have doesn't fit the problem you're trying to solve today, regardless of how well it fit the problem you were solving yesterday. So I don't much care any more how my data is stored; what matters is how to retrieve the relevant pieces when I need them.

This seems very true to me right now, as much of the work I'm doing both at work and on my own revolves around retrieving packages, applications, source and binaries from various locations in order to produce system images – bootable images like a full running distribution or a PXE booted root fs.

The problem isn't what format anything is in but whether I can get to those items I need, that the conform to some form of parsable packaging and that they require little to no human interaction for installation. Like Rob, I don't really care what format the data is in, just as long as its accessible.