Re: More git status --porcelain lossage

From: Eric Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>
Date: Apr 10, 2010, 19:41 UTC
Message-ID: <20100410194154.GB28768@thyrsus.com>
In-Reply-To: <m3k4sfgmjc.fsf@localhost.localdomain>

Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>:

> Are out of your f**g mind?  XML, really?  XML might be good choice to
> *define* _document_ formats, but is really poor data exchange /
> serialization format (being overly verbose, among others).  Also, XML
> is not language but meta-language.

Agreed.

> I could understand providing JSON format, specified using --json
> option.

You know, that's actually an interesting idea. I mentioned it previously as the not-XML if we want to build on a metaprotocol; I wasn't considering it seriously then. But I am now, and it is not without attractions. JSON would certainly solve all the delimiter and empty-object edge cases, and it has excellent extensibility.

>    I think there is some GPLv2 compatibile JSON generating code
> in C (MIT licensed code is GPLv2 compatibilie, isn't it?); we can
> always borrow compact JSON generation code from GPSD project (if
> license allows it) from ESR.

My license would allow it, but there's not really a lot of win in trying to reuse JSON generator code - writing your own printfs for it by hand is easy and fast.

Emacs Lisp has a JSON parser, so it would meet my needs.

Alternatively, a cleaned-up --porcelain -Z along the lines previously suggested would be good.

Supplying both might not be a bad idea. The volume of code involved would be low.

-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>