On Mon, Jun 24, 2019 at 4:32 PM Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@xxxxxx> wrote: > > Hi Duy, > > On Fri, 21 Jun 2019, Duy Nguyen wrote: > > > On Fri, Jun 21, 2019 at 8:16 PM Johannes Schindelin > > <Johannes.Schindelin@xxxxxx> wrote: > > > > > > 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. > > > > Considering the amount of code to output these, supporting multiple > > formats would be a nightmare. I may be ok with versioning the output > > so the tool know what format they need to deal with, but I'd rather > > support just one version. > > Once the format stabilized, I don't think it would be a huge burden to > support multiple formats, if we ever had to update. > > It would, however, be a huge burden on third-party applications. In > effect, we could be lazy, but we would put a lot more burden on others > than we saved ourselves, so that would be a bit... selfish. JSON is the land of high level languages. They can adapt to new format quite easily, compared to restructuring C to support multiple different formats. Yes I'm quite OK with being selfish in this case. -- Duy
