Re: [Monotone-devel] monotone automate stdio

[Sebastian Spaeth]

>>> Just a small comment; maybe a format using the numeric prefix
>>> familiar to us all from RFCs like
>>>
>>> 200 OK UNKNOWN test/foo
>>> 201 foo.h
>>> 201 foo.c

I know it makes sense to add something like this in general.
But I am against it.

The beauty of "automate" (in my eyes) is its simplicity. You run a
command. You get back a simple list of information. That's it.
I propose to give other feedback (an error occured, the query was
non-sensical) through an error code when mt exits, or through stderr.
This makes it darn easy to parse it with some scripts without the need
to have delimiters, escape delimiters, ...

If you need more information, use that
sed/perl/awk-within-monotone-minilanguage which is being developed to
control the format, possibly having something like %n for a "error" code
as you propose. Other will be able to fill in more about this...

spaetz