On 2013-05-06, at 9:56, Tim Kientzle <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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.)
If I can throw in my 2c, please do not choose XML as the encoding format. Using JSON or YAML is so much easier to parse and read. Cheers, Andreas
