Support JSON with --json flag and provide header files

[Alexander Mills <alexander.d.mills@gmail.com>]

@git

I hear there is a movement underway to have git support JSON for the
purposes of machine readable stdio.

That is all good and well. I want to add to that request. Imagine a
software world were serialized data could be typed. So JSON produced
by C/C++ could be described and the receiving process could have type
information about how the JSON would be deserialized.

How would that work? For every typed language, Git would provide
header files for that language that include type information for each
JSON string that would be produced by git commands.

How could that be accomplished? Someone needs to create a system to
generate type information (header files) for each language based off a
single central format. So we create a JSON format that describes the
JSON data. And from that single format we generate header files for
each typed language.

I hope you see the value in that. There could be a git command that
generates the header files for a given language, given the git
version:

$ git --generate-header-files --language=java > $dir

the above command would generate the right header files for Java given
the git version. Or the headers could be stored on the www and could
be downloadable for each git version. Perhaps Git authors wouldn't do
all this work - perhaps they just author a JSON format that describes
JSON. And the OSS community can write tools that convert the JSON
format into header files for each language. But I would like something
OFFICIAL to take place here.

Hope this makes sense. I am looking forward to a software future where
parsing stdio is easier by using machine readable JSON. Want human
readable output? Use the regular command. Want machine readable
output? use the --json flag.

-alex

-- 
Alexander D. Mills
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