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

Hi Peff & Jeff ;-)

On Wed, 20 Jul 2016, Jeff King wrote:

On Wed, Jul 20, 2016 at 03:27:45PM -0400, Jeff Hostetler wrote:

quoted

quoted

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