Re: [RFC/PATCH v2 0/4] A new library for plumbing output (inc. current status)

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 10:46:18PM +0100, Julian Phillips wrote:

> It might help standardise the output between commands if there were helper
> functions for some of the larger structures - e.g. commits.  Though I don't
> think that those functions would be able to do legacy output, due to the
> current lack of cross-command output compatibility.  I'm starting to see
> this with blame and diff-tree (and family), where they both want to output
> information about commits.

Yeah, that was what I saw on looking at the code. And we have to support
those old formats, obviously. For the most part, I found the level of
verbosity in the patches you posted (and I just peeked at your repo) to
be fine. Sure, it's more lines, but they're IMHO very easy to read.

If we have to tradeoff between either duplicating output entirely (for
both the output form and traditional form) or having a more flexible but
slightly more verbose output library, I think I would rather go with the
latter. It will be more maintainable in the long run.

-Peff