Re: ls*, markup and other things

[Alexey M. <al...@hs...>]

>>>>> "WJ" == Wang Jian <la...@li...> writes:

 AM> There's an issue I want to discuss though. Current format of ls*
 AM> commands are humanly readable and understandable but they can be more,
 AM> hmm, formalized or smth (especially lsacl, but ls also has portability
 AM> bottlenecks and so on). So my question is: do we need these commands
 AM> to have an, hmm, XML-like output? If yes, what's the DTD? There're
 AM> pros (we won't need an unique parser for each command) and cons (the
 AM> server code needs to be more complex, there will be greater output
 AM> size and so on) so final decision should be carefully discussed.

 WJ> I don't think output of XML-like format is good. The pros doesn't buy
 WJ> cons.

Well, first I too was against the XML.

Now, I think that XML is viable option (of course, not via full libxml,
simply printf-style ;).

The thing is that the recipients of the 'cvs lsacl' command are usually
some web front-ends, which are written in Perl as the very least (but could
be simply done with Java/XSLT, if needed (so we could do the direct
transformation of the ACLs to webpage!)).  I hope that Perl finally caught
up with XML parsing with Java at last (AFAIH, two years ago it was almost
inadequate).

So, the server-side XML handling is very simple, while the client-side XML
handling is completely standalone and we should not bother about _its_
bloat.

Currently Alex is the primary customer of the 'cvs lsacl' command and it
seems to me he hates its output :)

--alexm