[GSoC] Machine readable output from userland utilities

Adrian Chadd adrian at freebsd.org
Fri May 23 16:30:55 UTC 2014


ayup.



-a

On 23 May 2014 09:11, Jonathan Anderson
<jonathan.robert.anderson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 23 May 2014, at 13:34, Adrian Chadd <adrian at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> I'd actually prefer that some library API (like what's in libstatfoo)
> gets fleshed out to cover what hooks and options are required so you
> don't have to have the bikeshed argument of "what format." You only
> need to write some code to output it in the format you want.
>
> The UNIX way is tools, not policy. The library is a policy, sure, but
> it's a policy to let you define your own policies. It won't be locking
> anyone into anything like "json or bust."
>
> So how about the focus be on that, rather than trying to teach
> individual tools about individual encoding types?
>
>
> I think that's pretty much what the proposal says:
>
>> I'm planning to create a unified output abstraction in the form of a
>> library. The tools supporting the machine-readable output feature
>> will write output exclusively using the library. The exact output format
>> will be customizable. Several backend libraries (like libucl and libnv)
>> can be used to implement different formats.
>
> Am I perhaps misunderstanding you, and you're actually saying "let's not get
> distracted by bikesheds, the proposal is terrific as-is"?
>
>
> Jon
> --
> Jonathan Anderson
>
> jonathan at FreeBSD.org
> http://freebsd.org/~jonathan/


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