# from Ovid
# on Thursday 21 August 2008 11:53:
>> If TAP goes any further than saying "Yes, you *can*
>> stuff a big wad of custom data in this ganky old potato sack
>> ... there may be a hole in the bottom ...
>> so if there's any other way, we encourage you to do that" ...
What would this "any other way" be? And why would the sack have a hole
in it? Are we delivering a package or just kicking a sack down the
street?
>That's actually all TAP will be doing. You *can* stuff that big wad
> of diagnostic data there in a machine-readable format, but there are
> two overriding concerns:
>
>1. It's entirely optional.
>2. It must not alter the interpretation of core TAP.
>...
>But at the end of the day, this is a feature people have been wanting
> for a long time, even if (for most cases), it's merely a case of
> "file, line, have, want".
Well, exactly how are we defining "sack", "potato", and "wad" here, and
how does it have anything to do with what people want?
If diagnostics are a data block, the only thing the TAP stream must do
is keep the data from getting corrupted and/or leaking into the rest of
the stream. This says the consumer has to know where it ends, which
doesn't work if it's a sack with a hole in it.
But none of that provides anybody with the "file, line, have, want"
thing. That would be a special, identified, form of data block with
parsable, meaningful content.
If I have a GUI harness displaying the 'have' and 'want' graphics
(pretend they are jpg or svg, or even one of each) for a failed test
next to each other, would this be a custom consumer only in that it
does something particular in interpreting the 'have' and 'want' values?
Or, is it a custom consumer in that it takes the $diagnostic block (with
an $identifier which says it is JSON), deserializes that, and looks
for 'have', 'want', and etc values in the resultant structure?
If the former, then the TAP spec must define the structure of the
diagnostics, or at least some part of it, and still needs to provide a
sack somehow. If the latter, then TAP just defines a sack of bytes (it
could still go forward from there to claim some particular sacks as
reserved and/or recommended usage, right?)
--Eric
--
"...our schools have been scientifically designed to
prevent overeducation from happening."
--William Troy Harris
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