svn commit: r284198 - head/bin/ls

[Marcel Moolenaar]

> On Jun 13, 2015, at 1:19 PM, Julian Elischer <julian at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> On 6/13/15 11:38 PM, David Chisnall wrote:
>> On 13 Jun 2015, at 11:17, Ian Lepore <ian at freebsd.org> wrote:
>>> If you would have told me a year ago that you had a simple scheme that
>>> could make 30 years of experience maintaining code for unix-like systems
>>> completely worthless I would have been skeptical, but it seems we're
>>> well on our way.
>> There is a lot of heckling and unhelpful hyperbole in this thread.  Reading the xo_emit format strings takes a little bit of getting used to, but the same is true of printf - it’s just that we’re already used to printf.  The structured parts (xo_open_container, xo_close_container and friends) are clear and descriptive.  The changes are fairly invasive, but the benefits are also very large for anyone who is wanting to automate administration of FreeBSD systems.
>> 
>> If you have suggestions for how the libxo APIs could be improved, then please let us know - Phil is very reception to suggestions but objections along the lines of ‘it’s not what I’m used to and changes sometimes break things so we should never have changes’ are not helpful.
>> 
>> David
>> 
> I made a suggestion for an alternate path in the previous thread.
> 
> https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2015-March/054855.html
> 
> but I have a job and kids so I can't object if I'm not listened to..
> (no time to actually follow my own advice and produce working code.)

Not wanting to change all programs and instead write grammars for all
programs seems like a worse solution. The scope is the same (same
number of programs), but since the grammars and programs are two
distinct entities, it’s actually fairly hard to make sure both are
changed at the same time when so needed. It’s also not at all a
given that screen scrubbing is always easy enough to do that it
isn’t causing some sort of problems in specific situations. If
one wants to output JSON, XML and HTML you find that screen
scrubbing doesn’t even give you all the information you need. It’s
very natural to come to the conclusion that it’s easier to get the
data from the source and skip the entire non-lossless translation
phase.

--
Marcel Moolenaar
marcel at xcllnt.net

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