BIND segway -> python -> first-class ports

[Daniel O'Connor]

On 9 Dec 2013, at 11:22, Darren Pilgrim <list_freebsd at bluerosetech.com> wrote:

> On 12/8/2013 11:02 AM, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
>> So if I were going to task the talented Devin Teske with something,
>> remember you just asked my opinion, then it would be to look at
>> putting Lua in the boot loader, getting python into base, or working
>> on making our utilities be able to output standard machine readable
>> formats such as yaml, XML and json.
> 
> Can you cite a real-world example of a general-purpose OS where this was beneficial?  Beneficial here means otherwise impossible functionality or automation gains without adding barriers for low-level diagnostics, tuning, corner-case configurations and other modes of advanced control.

It is not that parsing the human readable output of the tools is impossible, it's that it's tedious bullshit code that you shouldn't have to write in the first place.

I would kill for a way to be able to do something like..
output=`somecmd -J`
foo=`jsonextract -f some.field $output`
bar=`jsonextract -f another.field.here $output`

Even nicer would be if the shell could do it internally so you didn't have to re-parse it all the time but it's a start :)

(I don't care if it's JSON, XML or smoke signals just so long as it isn't hideously slow).

--
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
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