Re: Pretty output in JSON format

[Ron Ziroby Romero <ziroby@gmail.com>]

> On Fri, 27 Sept 2024, 10:30 demerphq, <demerphq@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, 26 Sept 2024 at 23:04, brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 2024-09-25 at 18:45:54, Sean Allred wrote:
>>> > "brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> writes:
>>> >
>>> > > On 2024-09-24 at 21:52:35, Ron Ziroby Romero wrote:
>>> > >> What do y'all think?
>>> > >
>>> > > I think this is ultimately a bad idea.  JSON requires that the output be
>>> > > UTF-8, but Git processes a large amount of data, including file names,
>>> > > ref names, commit messages, author and committer identities, diff
>>> > > output, and other file contents, that are not restricted to UTF-8.
>>> >
>>> > This strikes me with a little bit of 'perfect as the enemy of good'
>>> > here. I'm sure there are ways to signal an encoding failure. I would,
>>> > however, caution against trying to provide diff output in JSON. That
>>> > just seems... odd. Maybe base64 it first? (I don't know -- I just
>>> > struggle to see the use-case here.)
>>>
>>> I understand JSON output would be useful, but it's also not useful to
>>> randomly fail to do git for-each-ref (for example) because someone has a
>>> non-UTF-8 ref, or to fail to do a git log because of encoding problems
>>
>>
>> I dont really follow your argument, and I find it weird how you are talking about a specific encoding of unicode instead of Unicode itself.
>>
>> It is possible to represent every binary string as Unicode encoded as UTF-8 (or any of the UTF encodings). It may not be bytewise equivalent with the original, but why should that matter? There are a set of clear rules for doing the required transformations, and there is a huge body of tooling to do so. As long as you know the target encoding, you should be able to round trip data properly.
>>
>> IMO CBOR would just complicate what should be a relatively simple problem to solve.
>>
>> cheers,
>> Yves
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"



Hi. I've been working with the code and trying to figure out how to do
this. I've also started work on a formal proposal. Two things have
come up that I wanted to discuss:

First, I'm questioning my approach of hacking pretty.c with a series
of 'if json' blocks. Would it be better to make a new file, json-log.,
and divorce myself from the pretty flow entirely? This would also go
hand in hand with changing from "--pretty=json" to simply "--json"

Second, I see that someone is adding a --json flag to git status[1]. I
figure that argues for git log to use the --json flag. I don't think
that affects me other than making the case for this JSON output.

 ## References

 [1] Patrick Steinhardt, “Re: [PATCH] diff: add --json output format,”
message to git@vger.kernel.org, July 29, 2025.
https://public-inbox.org/git/pull.1937.git.1753856826464.gitgitgadget@gmail.com/

 Thanks,
 Ziroby Ron Romero