Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2014 17:40:58 -0700 From: Alfred Perlstein <bright@mu.org> To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org, John-Mark Gurney <jmg@funkthat.com>, marcel@freebsd.org, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk>, Konstantin Belousov <kostikbel@gmail.com>, Phil Shafer <phil@juniper.net>, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> Subject: Re: XML Output: libxo - provide single API to output TXT, XML, JSON and HTML Message-ID: <53ED571A.9030503@mu.org> In-Reply-To: <746AC443-B255-47DD-8C24-3E3A32A5CC05@bsdimp.com> References: <201408141516.s7EFGE4a096197@idle.juniper.net> <746AC443-B255-47DD-8C24-3E3A32A5CC05@bsdimp.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On 8/14/14 8:23 AM, Warner Losh wrote: > Sorry for top posting, this really isn=92t responsive to the minutia in= the rest of the thread. > > I=92m curious. Why isn=92t this conversation about =93foo =97supports-x= ml=94 ? Why tag these commands with weird, non-standard things that need = more exotic tools to dig the information out. Why not have a standardized= command line option that prints nothing and returns 0 for success, or wh= ines and returns 1 for failure? That=92s way more standardized than addin= g obscure notes that may or may not be allowed by the standard, but that = we traditionally haven=92t done, which requires tools that aren=92t stand= ardized and whose interface varies from one tool to the next. This is tru= e of asking about DT_NEEDED (which forces a specific library for the impl= ementation) as well as anything placed in the NOTES section. It also assu= mes that you know the thing you are querying is an ELF executable, that y= ou can find it, that there=92s not a shell script wrapper for that tool t= hat redirects to binaries that do support this, etc, etc etc. > > Basically, what does this =91meta data=92 really buy you that can=92t b= e bought some other, more standard, more direct way that doesn=92t enshri= ne so many hard-coded implementation decisions into the mix? In addition I am wondering what branding the binaries really offers "as-i= s". Example, let's say you have a means to query and find out that "netstat" = supports libxo. Well, netstat has many output variants: netstat netstat -r netstat -a netstat -nr netstat -na netstat -p tcp So given that is appears that we want to build something so that "file=20 browsers" can automatically determine that a program can be run in=20 "libxo" mode and some form of output should be rendered, what exactly is = the preferred format? What happens when a particular program's default behavior is to filter=20 stdin, but yet supports libxo, how is that handled? What happens when a particular program's default behavior is to run=20 indefinitely, and yet supports libxo, how is that handled? It makes sense to limit the scope of the project to just doing the=20 formatted output at least until we see what we get when get a whole=20 bunch of tools running with it. Speaking of getting a whole bunch of tools running with it, the GSOC=20 project happened to have near a dozen programs converted, how is the=20 libxo project coming along, do we have more programs converted? Without=20 the programs converted we don't have very much to show even with a great = library. What other apps use libxo in the tree now? -Alfred
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?53ED571A.9030503>