Hi Axel, I add CC:linux-btrfs because I think that what you are saying is important and it was discussed in ML.
[we are talking about the Axel patches to "btrfs sub list" command] On 2015-10-05 19:27, Axel Burri wrote: > Hi Goffredo > > Don't get me wrong, I don't want to blame you (or anyone), actually I'm > only arguing what I think is best for btrfs. I started to write those > patches because btrfs-scriptability is pretty bad (there is also "btrfs > sub show" which has pretty un-parseable output"), and I think this is > very important for the success of btrfs, and no-one seemed to address this. In the past, when I developed the "btrfs fi usage/btrfs dev usage" I put a lot of effort to have an output easily machine readable: one data per line, key without space; I remember the battle to have in the key "_" instead of space :-) However other people changed that to a more (human) readable output. May be that I was wrong; I don't know. However for sure, if I look to other projects: - systemd: it uses some btrfs capability, but it uses the ioctl directly. - snapper: it uses ioctl directly So I have to conclude that it is not common to use btrfs (as progs) directly. Few times I noticed somebodies are working on a libbtrfs. May be this is a better approach. > > I know that nowadays people expect to get shiny output from command-line > tools, but IMHO it is much more important to have consistent > machine-readable output before even thinking of human readability (since > there are so many unix commands to translate it, e.g. "columns"). Now > this is sadly not the case with btrfs-progs, and it's hard to change it > when people are used to it. Note that when writing the patches I was > also thinking of introducing some "--machine-readable" option, but this > seemed so wrong to me... I think that "--machine-readable" (or similar) is a better approach: the output of the btrfs command in the past is changed even drastically (give a look to my work on the mkfs.btrfs); but we could force us to have an output "backward compatible" and machine (programmer) friendly if a switch like "--machine-readable" is used. [...] > > Regards, > > - Axel BR Goffredo -- gpg @keyserver.linux.it: Goffredo Baroncelli <kreijackATinwind.it> Key fingerprint BBF5 1610 0B64 DAC6 5F7D 17B2 0EDA 9B37 8B82 E0B5 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
