Re: [Bug-tar] Tar's --xattrs | --selinux | --acls listing feature

[Andreas Dilger]

On 2012-05-03, at 9:41 PM, Tim Kientzle wrote:
> On May 3, 2012, at 11:27 AM, Andreas Dilger wrote:
>> If you are looking for an output format that is relatively easy for humans 
>> to read, but is still well formatted and machine parseable, please consider 
>> using YAML.  This is a colon-delimited text format, similar to what you 
>> propose above, but has a few more features.  There are YAML parsers for 
>> virtually every language, so should be considered as the first choice of 
>> machine-readable textual output, rather than inventing some new format.
> 
> YAML would be reasonable, or JSON or XML.
> I'm not very particular.
> 
> I would like to see a written proposal for such a format.
> If it looks reasonable, we could easily add it to bsdtar
> as well.

YAML and JSON are virtually identical.  XML is painful for output that
also needs to be human-readable.

Cheers, Andreas