Re: [Bug-tar] Colorized output for GNU tar discussion

[Tim Kientzle]

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.)

Tim