From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason Date: Sat, 10 Apr 2010 19:39:59 GMT Subject: Re: More git status --porcelain lossage Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <20100410193039.GA28768@thyrsus.com> On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 19:30, Eric Raymond wrote: > Simon : >> Why not use an XML output? >> Plain text is easier to parse, but XML may give this extra durability >> you are looking for? > > Because XML is awfully heavyewight, and XML parsers tend to be slow. > > If we were going to buld on a metaprotocol, JSON would be better.  IMHO. A lot of web services (like some Catalyst-based applications) support all of these equally. If Git had machine readable output like this it would be nice if every git-* program just had --format=* where * could be xml, json, yaml, sexp, perl etc. The program would just construct a native datastructure and then there would be an output driver to generate the textual representation.