Re: [PATCH v1 0/6] Porcelain Status V2

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Wed, Jul 20, 2016 at 03:27:45PM -0400, Jeff Hostetler wrote:

> > A totally reasonable response is "haha no. Please stop moving the
> > goalposts". I just wanted to throw it out there as an option (and in
> > case you are interested, to let you think about it before any more work
> > goes into this direction).
> 
> haha no.... :-)
> 
> Short term, I'd rather nail down what I have now (both content-wise
> and format-wise) and see how we like it.  And have a follow-up task
> to look at the --state header we spoke of earlier.  And save the JSON
> version as an independent task for later.
> 
> I understand the motivation for a JSON option (and have thought
> about it before) but I think it ought to be kept separate.
> At a higher-level, it seems like a JSON option would be an
> opportunity to start a project-wide conversation about formats,
> consistency, plumbing, and etc.  A top-down conversation if you
> will about which commands will/won't get enhanced, legacy cruft
> that would not need to be converted, JSON style and naming and
> consistency issues, current best practices in the node/whatever
> community, and etc.  I could be wrong, but this feels like a
> top-down feature conversation in a wider audience.

I agree with everything you've said here.

If we add JSON, we'd want to do it everywhere: lists of commits, lists
of refs, status output, etc. I mentioned that somebody had asked me
about it recently; they are working on a git client and finding that
libgit2 is not serving their needs well, so they'd like to shell out to
git more, and wanted to have a standard way to get the data back in.

-Peff