On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 10:22:49PM -0500, Phillip Susi wrote: > Not too long ago I was looking at patching gparted to support this and > while it did not seem difficult to process the output of the e2fsprogs > utilities for the progress information, I was wondering why the > various fs utilities don't already have a flag to generate machine > readable output... and I think some of the utilities supported this, > and some did not, even within e2fsprogs.
Quite. Of course we should use it where it exists. > IIRC, I found that at least some of them already have a flag to write > output to a specified auxiliary fd to indicate progress, it just > seemed that a standard needed decided on and implemented in all of them. This is a complete red herring: we don't need a standard. We invoke them all independently anyway, so invoking them in different ways and even handling different styles of output is not a problem. Trying to invent and enforce a standard just takes you down an unnecessary rathole of months spent trying to convince maintainers to change their machine-parseable output, any of whom might point out with good reason that it's machine-parseable and therefore is not supposed to change frivolously. -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@debian.org] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-boot-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20121217095039.gj21...@riva.dynamic.greenend.org.uk
