On 6/14/15 2:40 AM, Marcel Moolenaar wrote:
On Jun 13, 2015, at 1:19 PM, Julian Elischer <jul...@freebsd.org> wrote:
On 6/13/15 11:38 PM, David Chisnall wrote:
On 13 Jun 2015, at 11:17, Ian Lepore <i...@freebsd.org> wrote:
If you would have told me a year ago that you had a simple scheme that
could make 30 years of experience maintaining code for unix-like systems
completely worthless I would have been skeptical, but it seems we're
well on our way.
There is a lot of heckling and unhelpful hyperbole in this thread. Reading the
xo_emit format strings takes a little bit of getting used to, but the same is
true of printf - it’s just that we’re already used to printf. The structured
parts (xo_open_container, xo_close_container and friends) are clear and
descriptive. The changes are fairly invasive, but the benefits are also very
large for anyone who is wanting to automate administration of FreeBSD systems.
If you have suggestions for how the libxo APIs could be improved, then please
let us know - Phil is very reception to suggestions but objections along the
lines of ‘it’s not what I’m used to and changes sometimes break things so we
should never have changes’ are not helpful.
David
I made a suggestion for an alternate path in the previous thread.
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2015-March/054855.html
but I have a job and kids so I can't object if I'm not listened to..
(no time to actually follow my own advice and produce working code.)
Not wanting to change all programs and instead write grammars for all
programs seems like a worse solution. The scope is the same (same
number of programs), but since the grammars and programs are two
distinct entities, it’s actually fairly hard to make sure both are
changed at the same time when so needed. It’s also not at all a
given that screen scrubbing is always easy enough to do that it
isn’t causing some sort of problems in specific situations. If
one wants to output JSON, XML and HTML you find that screen
scrubbing doesn’t even give you all the information you need. It’s
very natural to come to the conclusion that it’s easier to get the
data from the source and skip the entire non-lossless translation
phase.
But once you have the framework for handling grammars you can make
grammars for OTHER utilities that are not part of FreeBSD, and will
NEVER EVER EVER have libxo support. And as a bonus you leave the existing
programs alone entirely. I believe that in the end if you want to
follow the path
of automatic harvesting of data, you'll need the grammar handler
anyway because
all the 3rd party apps still require handling.
It's a tricky task but It would be a really fascinating project.
Especially tools that would look at
existing output and allow the user to interactively identify tokens
and landmarks of interest and
generate grammars. We did this 20 years ago with scanned images..
So I'm sure it be done with ascii text. Come to think of it, there
must be some out there already..
--
Marcel Moolenaar
mar...@xcllnt.net
_______________________________________________
svn-src-head@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/svn-src-head
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "svn-src-head-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
