Re: Suggestion on git-push --porcelain

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 10, 2010, 19:14 UTC
Message-ID: <7vaavgaony.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <be6fef0d1002100318v902689xc937cd332ac752b3@mail.gmail.com>

Tay Ray Chuan <rctay89@gmail.com> writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

> I sense a chicken-and-egg situation here.
>
> Printing a "To: <destination>" to stdout is a correction as far as the
> current non-prefixed output scheme is concerned.
>
> If a prefixed scheme (or some other output scheme) is adopted, then
> where, or whether, the "To: <destination>" is printed, is not relevant
> to porcelain script writers - they just get ignored.

Sorry. I don't get this. Are you saying that you will write "To" without the prefix in order to make older scripts ignore it? What then would newer scripts that want to use the information do? Pay attention to lines that do not start with your prefix? Then what good does it do to introduce such a prefix to the output?

I think what you need is not a prefix or any syntax but a rule that says "ignore things that you do not understand" and possibly a way for the output stream to say "if you do not understand this, you are too old to correctly process this stream---please abort, because ignoring this will make you produce an incorrect result".