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Re: [Bug-tar] Colorized output for GNU tar discussion
From: |
Andreas Dilger |
Subject: |
Re: [Bug-tar] Colorized output for GNU tar discussion |
Date: |
Mon, 6 May 2013 11:35:02 -0600 |
On 2013-05-06, at 9:56, Tim Kientzle <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On May 6, 2013, at 6:46 AM, Marek Kielar wrote:
>
>> Colorizations made using piping to external tools suffer from lack of
>> semantic information about the output. Take colordiff for example - in many
>> places it parses (regex's) the output hoping it does The Good Thing, but
>> still its just hoping (and fails sometimes).
>>
>> If there was an output version that was semantically complete (e.g. some
>> kind of markup on normal output) for automatic interpretation, it would
>> always be easy to achieve colorization (and other mangling) through external
>> tools. It would also make those tools way simpler, since they would just
>> re-interpret and not heuristically regex through the human-readable output.
>> Moreover, in such case, there would be no problems with signaling etc.
>
> So you are basically suggesting that tar have an XML/json/yaml/etc
> output format so that external tools can robustly utilize the data.
> (E.g., format it, present it in a GUI, etc.)
If I can throw in my 2c, please do not choose XML as the encoding format. Using
JSON or YAML is so much easier to parse and read.
Cheers, Andreas