Massive libxo-zation that breaks everything

[Rui Paulo]

On Mar 1, 2015, at 11:11, David Chisnall <theraven at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> How would it be in a port?  It involves modifying core utilities (some of which, like ifconfig, rely on kernel APIs that change between releases) to emit structured output.  Maintaining two copies of each utility, one in the base system with plain-text output only and another in ports with XML/JSON output would be very painful.

It would work fine if we had *libraries* for ifconfig/netstat/route/etc.  Obviously that's not the case and no one has stepped up to implement them.  I've also seen FreeBSD committers expressing their distaste for libraries for "trivial" command line utilities, which implies they are unaware of another world beyond the CLI.  :-)

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Rui Paulo