Re: General output formatting

> Marc Branchaud <marcnarc@xiplink.com> writes:
> 
>>> I wonder if isatty(1) is a good way to say "ah, we are not captured
>>> in 'foo=$(git blah)' and not feeding somebody in 'git blah |
>>> somebody', so we do not have to worry about being machine readable".
>>> If that is a reliable way to tell that we could butcher our output
>>> for the sake of keeping the terminal state sane, we then can always
>>> do the C-quote escaping, or even information losing '?' redaction.
>>
>> Modern practice seems to be moving towards explicit format options to
>> let code that's parsing output directly specify how it wants to see
>> the data.  Such options eliminate the need for isatty() heuristics and
>> other guesswork.
> 
> I am not opposed to an explicit "please avoid raw binary output" or
> even "please make it even more machine-processable by formatting in
> yaml" options.  What I was hinting at was what the default should be
> for interactive use when the output goes directly to the eyes of
> end-users, which is pretty much orthogonal.