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   mhoye (mhoye@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 05:15:11 JST mhoye

   Lazyweb, a somewhat serious question: Given that we have https://jsonlines.org/ now, would a campaign to encourage as many command-line applications and logging libraries as possible to support that as a standard option:

   1) have a shot at working,
   2) be credible at all,
   3) be a net benefit to the world, and
   4) be worth the effort?

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     see shy jo (joeyh@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 05:16:46 JST see shy jo

     in reply to

     @mhoye so I've supported this (in git-annex) since before the spec existed. I do have a few thoughts.

     Without a json schema for a particular program's output, it's hard to know if the objects you're seeing are the only ones it emits. Maybe there is a field that goes missing sometimes, or a different object that is emitted on error.

     unix tools generally avoid this problem by having simple and self-descriptive output. json moves the goalposts some.

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     see shy jo (joeyh@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 05:17:30 JST see shy jo

     in reply to

     @mhoye example of me fucking up in a way that broke a downstream consumer

     http://source.git-annex.branchable.com/?p=source.git;a=commitdiff;h=1beca851ff23b0727f6adefc52dbbb9ba1091fac

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     see shy jo (joeyh@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 05:17:31 JST see shy jo

     in reply to

     @mhoye Once a program has started emitting json, it's now locked into doing that in future versions in a compatible way.

     My approach has been that all json output be self-describing. Ie, a given (sub)command's json output always has the same objects with the same fields in all circumstances.

     (Except for the one subcommand that I messed up and its output was not self-describing and now I'm stuck with it.)

     This has all felt nontrivial to me. Worth it tho.

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     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 05:19:54 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to

     • see shy jo
     @joeyh @mhoye Yeah, in webdev there's things like OpenAPI which can serve to both nicely document and validate the output.
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     see shy jo (joeyh@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 05:19:55 JST see shy jo

     in reply to

     @mhoye maybe this kind of thing is par for the course in json use in webdev, IDK

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     see shy jo (joeyh@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 05:32:23 JST see shy jo

     in reply to

     @mhoye also unix programs often don't have output limited to utf8. so json can quite complicate situations involving eg non-unicode filenames and other things that people don't want to think about but that still exist

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     see shy jo (joeyh@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 05:39:09 JST see shy jo

     in reply to

     @mhoye all of which is not to say it's bad. yt-dlp supporting json output has been useful to me for example

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