Re: [RFC/PATCH] status: Add a new NUL separated output format

From: Julian Phillips <julian@quantumfyre.co.uk>
Date: Apr 10, 2010, 20:34 UTC
Message-ID: <1702f7c7b0e0689149702335c9efad3f@212.159.54.234>
In-Reply-To: <20100410195003.GA28871@thyrsus.com>

On Sat, 10 Apr 2010 15:50:03 -0400, Eric Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com> wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> Julian Phillips <julian@quantumfyre.co.uk>:
>> Add a new output format option to git-status that is a more extreme
>> form of the -z output that places a NUL between all parts of the
>> record, and always has three entries per record, even when only two
>> are relevant.  This make the parsing of --porcelain output much
>> simpler for the consumer.
> 
> If you're open to changing this to lose the exiguous "-> " and use "-"
> instead of " " as a status character, that would make me happy 
> and fix the rest of the design problems with the format.

If you use "--porcelain -Z" then you don't get the "->", the format is always XY<NUL><file1><NUL><file2><NUL>, with <file2> being an empty string if only file1 is relevant.

I didn't use "-" instead of " " as that seemed out of scope for a output formatting option. Though I don't personally have an objection to it, I also don't see a particularly strong need for it as with the -Z format there is no ambiguity.

If you're talking about the output without -Z, then changing the format raises compatibility issues, and were talking about something more like --porcelain2 or --porcelain=new and I don't know if that would be considered acceptable.

-- 
Julian