An design question was open for me in the beginning was whether to
serialize other types to disk, but Protocol Buffers quickly won out,
which allows us to drop support for other types. This is a good
start to cleaning up a lot of cruft in the storage stack and
can let us eventually decouple the various moving parts into
separate subsystems for easier reasoning.
This commit is not strictly required, but it is a start to making
the rest a lot more enjoyable to interact with.
It is the case with the benchmark tool that we thought that we
generated multiple series and saved them to the disk as such, when
in reality, we overwrote the fields of the outgoing metrics via
Go map reference behavior. This was accidental. In the course of
diagnosing this, a few errors were found:
1. ``newSeriesFrontier`` should check to see if the candidate fingerprint is within the given domain of the ``diskFrontier``. If not, as the contract in the docstring stipulates, a ``nil`` ``seriesFrontier`` should be emitted.
2. In the interests of aiding debugging, the raw LevelDB ``levigoIterator`` type now includes a helpful forensics ``String()`` method.
This work produced additional cleanups:
1. ``Close() error`` with the storage stack is technically incorrect, since nowhere in the bowels of it does an error actually occur. The interface has been simplified to remove this for now.
After this commit, we'll need to add validations that it does the
desired work, which we presently know that it doesn't. Given the
changes I made with a plethora of renamings, I want to commit this
now before it gets even larger.
Matt T. Proud