Subject: Re: More git status --porcelain lossage

From: Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Apr 2010 12:01:41 -0700 (PDT)

Simon <[email-masked]> writes:

> > A format properly designed for script parseability should use even use
> > whitespace as a field separator.
> >
> > Why?
> >
> > Because if you do that, front ends *will* do field analysis using a
> > naive split-on-whitespace operation.  And then...someday...someone
> > will try to run one of these of these on a volume from a system where
> > filenames contain embedded whitespace.  Like Mac OS X or Windows.
> 
> Why not use an XML output?
> Plain text is easier to parse, but XML may give this extra durability
> you are looking for?

Are out of your f**g mind?  XML, really?  XML might be good choice to
*define* _document_ formats, but is really poor data exchange /
serialization format (being overly verbose, among others).  Also, XML
is not language but meta-language.

I could understand providing JSON format, specified using --json
option.  I think there is some GPLv2 compatibile JSON generating code
in C (MIT licensed code is GPLv2 compatibilie, isn't it?); we can
always borrow compact JSON generation code from GPSD project (if
license allows it) from ESR.

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git