From: Marc Branchaud <marcnarc@xiplink.com>
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2025 17:14:42 GMT
Subject: Re: General output formatting
Message-ID: <18ed50b3-e5a4-43b3-a543-f9a3d2c309e6@xiplink.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq34fz9v1n.fsf@gitster.g>


On 2025-02-27 12:06, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> 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.

Sorry, I read "if that is a reliable way to tell" as looking for 
reliability.

I have no opinion on exactly how to "butcher" the output for a terminal. 
  I guess it depends on how well Git wants to support copy/paste of its 
output.

		M.