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

[Andreas Dilger]

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