Re: Suggestion on git-push --porcelain

Tay Ray Chuan [off-list ref] writes:

I sense a chicken-and-egg situation here.

Printing a "To: <destination>" to stdout is a correction as far as the
current non-prefixed output scheme is concerned.

If a prefixed scheme (or some other output scheme) is adopted, then
where, or whether, the "To: <destination>" is printed, is not relevant
to porcelain script writers - they just get ignored.

Sorry.  I don't get this.  Are you saying that you will write "To" without
the prefix in order to make older scripts ignore it?  What then would newer
scripts that want to use the information do?  Pay attention to lines that
do not start with your prefix?  Then what good does it do to introduce
such a prefix to the output?

I think what you need is not a prefix or any syntax but a rule that says
"ignore things that you do not understand" and possibly a way for the
output stream to say "if you do not understand this, you are too old to
correctly process this stream---please abort, because ignoring this will
make you produce an incorrect result".