Re: More git status --porcelain lossage

On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 19:30, Eric Raymond [off-list ref] wrote:

Simon [off-list ref]:

quoted

Why not use an XML output?
Plain text is easier to parse, but XML may give this extra durability
you are looking for?

Because XML is awfully heavyewight, and XML parsers tend to be slow.

If we were going to buld on a metaprotocol, JSON would be better.  IMHO.

A lot of web services (like some Catalyst-based applications) support
all of these equally. If Git had machine readable output like this it
would be nice if every git-* program just had --format=* where * could
be xml, json, yaml, sexp, perl etc.

The program would just construct a native datastructure and then there
would be an output driver to generate the textual representation.