Hi Peff, On Wed, 19 Jun 2019, Jeff King wrote: > On Wed, Jun 19, 2019 at 04:58:50PM +0700, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy wrote: > > > This is probably just my itch. Every time I have to do something with > > the index, I need to add a little bit code here, a little bit there to > > get a better "view" of the index. > > > > This solves it for me. It allows me to see pretty much everything in the > > index (except really low detail stuff like pathname compression). It's > > readable by human, but also easy to parse if you need to do statistics > > and stuff. You could even do a "diff" between two indexes. > > > > I'm not really sure if anybody else finds this useful. Because if not, > > I guess there's not much point trying to merge it to git.git just for a > > single user. Maintaining off tree is still a pain for me, but I think > > I can manage it. > > I don't have any particular use for this, but I am all in favor of tools > that make it easier to access and analyze information kept in our > on-disk formats (some of this is available via --debug, I think, but > AFAIK most of the extension bits are not). > > And I'd rather see something like JSON than inventing yet another ad-hoc > output format. > > I think your warning in the manpage that this is for debugging is fine, > as it does not put us on the hook for maintaining the feature nor its > format forever. We might want to call it "--debug=json" or something, > though, in case we do want real stable json support later (though of > course we would be free to steal the option then, since we're making no > promises). Traditionally, we have not catered well to 3rd-party applications in Git, and this JSON format would provide a way out of that problem. So I would like *not* to lock the door on letting this feature stabilize organically. I'd be much more in favor of `--json[=<version>]`, with an initial version of 0 to indicate that it really is unstable for now. Ciao, Dscho
