Re: [PATCH v1 0/6] Porcelain Status V2

[Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>]

Hi Peff & Jeff ;-)

On Wed, 20 Jul 2016, Jeff King wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 20, 2016 at 03:27:45PM -0400, Jeff Hostetler wrote:
> 
> > > A totally reasonable response is "haha no. Please stop moving the
> > > goalposts". I just wanted to throw it out there as an option (and in
> > > case you are interested, to let you think about it before any more work
> > > goes into this direction).
> > 
> > haha no.... :-)
> > 
> > Short term, I'd rather nail down what I have now (both content-wise
> > and format-wise) and see how we like it.  And have a follow-up task
> > to look at the --state header we spoke of earlier.  And save the JSON
> > version as an independent task for later.
> > 
> > I understand the motivation for a JSON option (and have thought
> > about it before) but I think it ought to be kept separate.
> > At a higher-level, it seems like a JSON option would be an
> > opportunity to start a project-wide conversation about formats,
> > consistency, plumbing, and etc.  A top-down conversation if you
> > will about which commands will/won't get enhanced, legacy cruft
> > that would not need to be converted, JSON style and naming and
> > consistency issues, current best practices in the node/whatever
> > community, and etc.  I could be wrong, but this feels like a
> > top-down feature conversation in a wider audience.
> 
> I agree with everything you've said here.
> 
> If we add JSON, we'd want to do it everywhere: lists of commits, lists
> of refs, status output, etc. I mentioned that somebody had asked me
> about it recently; they are working on a git client and finding that
> libgit2 is not serving their needs well, so they'd like to shell out to
> git more, and wanted to have a standard way to get the data back in.

Yeah, if we add JSON, we would want to add it everywhere. But we would
want to add that incrementally; otherwise it would be too humongous a
task.

And I think a good way forward was already suggested elsewhere in this
thread by Jeff: --porcelain=1j, or --porcelain=json (and maybe later
json-v2, json-v3, etc).

Ciao,
Dscho