Re: [RFC PATCH v1] telemetry design overview (part 1)

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Sat, Jun 09, 2018 at 10:05:49PM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

> > E.g., could we have a flag or environment variable to have the existing
> > traces output JSON? I guess right now they're inherently free-form via
> > trace_printf, so it would involve adding some structured interface
> > calls. Which is more or less what I guess JeffH's proposed feature to
> > look like.
> 
> I think that is a much larger project than what JeffHost proposed, and
> would unfortunately put too much of a brake on his project.

I definitely don't want to stall somebody else's momentum with a bunch
of what-if's. But I also don't want to end up down the road with two
nearly-identical systems for tracing information. That's confusing to
users, and to developers who must choose which system to use for any new
tracing information they add.

So I think it's worth at least giving a little thought to how we might
leverage similarities between the trace system and this. Even if we
don't implement it now, it would be nice to have a vague sense of how
they could grow together in the long run.

-Peff