[parted-devel] DISCUSS: Script-friendly interface

[Anant Narayanan]

Dear Leslie,

>> The down side of this is that XML is generally considered to be an
>> overkill for this kind of stuff,
> Also by me...

Agreed, then the next course of action would be to decide on how we want
the output to look like. A rough outline would be:

<string-separator>
$commandName
<string-separator>
$success
<string-separator>
$result
<string-separator>

Where <string-separator> is a unique string that is unlikely to appear
anywhere else.

$commandName is the command just issued, $success determines whether
$result is an error message or the output.

$result would require a format of its own, errors can have a standard
format:

$errorcode::$errorname::$reason

whereas if $result in the output itself, the format would vary greatly
according to the command issued.

>> /me Shouts :)
> How will you spare the time?  You must drown in all the workload...

I do admit that I don't have the time right now, but I will eventually.
  I don't claim to be working on this, I've just been thinking about it
while eating dinner ;)

If anyone else wants to start working right away, by all means do so.
Just keep us informed.

Speaking of which, how's the SoC project for Parted going on?

...
>> `machine' to every command, which when used outputs machine parse-able
>> information instead of the usual human-readable messages.
> Why is this better than, say, a command-line switch?

I was on the same line of thought, what I call `parameter' is your
`command-line switch' :)

Best Regards,

- Anant