Re: Pretty output in JSON format

From: Ron Ziroby Romero <ziroby@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 4, 2025, 20:39 UTC
Message-ID: <CAGW8g7kMVqsi6+JkdjDS-czKJQ=01ULUz36sZrGom+QPVtRF3A@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CANgJU+Xs-sQgAOCPL-5skaZGq7eHmhg0MaFGDr8N57=CK67iog@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, 27 Sept 2024 at 10:30, demerphq <demerphq@gmail.com> wrote:

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>
> On Thu, 26 Sept 2024 at 23:04, brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> wrote:
>>
>> On 2024-09-25 at 18:45:54, Sean Allred wrote:
>> > "brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> writes:
>> >
>> > > On 2024-09-24 at 21:52:35, Ron Ziroby Romero wrote:
>> > >> What do y'all think?
>> > >
>> > > I think this is ultimately a bad idea.  JSON requires that the output be
>> > > UTF-8, but Git processes a large amount of data, including file names,
>> > > ref names, commit messages, author and committer identities, diff
>> > > output, and other file contents, that are not restricted to UTF-8.
>> >
>> > This strikes me with a little bit of 'perfect as the enemy of good'
>> > here. I'm sure there are ways to signal an encoding failure. I would,
>> > however, caution against trying to provide diff output in JSON. That
>> > just seems... odd. Maybe base64 it first? (I don't know -- I just
>> > struggle to see the use-case here.)
>>
>> I understand JSON output would be useful, but it's also not useful to
>> randomly fail to do git for-each-ref (for example) because someone has a
>> non-UTF-8 ref, or to fail to do a git log because of encoding problems
>
>
> I dont really follow your argument, and I find it weird how you are talking about a specific encoding of unicode instead of Unicode itself.
>
> It is possible to represent every binary string as Unicode encoded as UTF-8 (or any of the UTF encodings). It may not be bytewise equivalent with the original, but why should that matter? There are a set of clear rules for doing the required transformations, and there is a huge body of tooling to do so. As long as you know the target encoding, you should be able to round trip data properly.
>
> IMO CBOR would just complicate what should be a relatively simple problem to solve.

Hi. I've been working with the code and trying to figure out how to do this. I've also started work on a formal proposal. Two things have come up that I wanted to discuss:

First, I'm questioning my approach of hacking pretty.c with a series of 'if json' blocks. Would it be better to make a new file, json-log.c, and divorce myself from the pretty flow entirely? This would also go hand in hand with changing from "--pretty=json" to simply "--json"

Second, I see that someone is adding a --json flag to git status[1]. I figure that argues for git log to use the --json flag. I don't think that affects me other than making the case for this JSON output.

## References

[1] Patrick Steinhardt, “Re: [PATCH] diff: add --json output format,” message to git@vger.kernel.org, July 29, 2025. https://public-inbox.org/git/pull.1937.git.1753856826464.gitgitgadget@gmail.com/

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>
> cheers,
> Yves
>
>
>
> --
> perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"

Cheers, Ziroby Ron Romero