On May 6, 2013, at 6:46 AM, Marek Kielar wrote: > Colorizations made using piping to external tools suffer from lack of > semantic information about the output. Take colordiff for example - in many > places it parses (regex's) the output hoping it does The Good Thing, but > still its just hoping (and fails sometimes). > > If there was an output version that was semantically complete (e.g. some kind > of markup on normal output) for automatic interpretation, it would always be > easy to achieve colorization (and other mangling) through external tools. It > would also make those tools way simpler, since they would just re-interpret > and not heuristically regex through the human-readable output. Moreover, in > such case, there would be no problems with signaling etc.
So you are basically suggesting that tar have an XML/json/yaml/etc output format so that external tools can robustly utilize the data. (E.g., format it, present it in a GUI, etc.) Tim