Re: GSOC: Structured output

[Dmitry V. L. <ld...@al...>]

On Sun, Mar 02, 2014 at 02:38:16PM +0300, Dennis Borisevich wrote:
> Hello.
> My name is Denis Borisevich. I am a Belarusian State University
> second-year student and I wish to participate in this year's Google
> Summer of Code. I am a fan of Unix-like systems and pure C programming.
> 
> I like the "Structured Output" idea, and I think it can be extended to
> a 'modular' output API or similar.
> 
> That means, I think that using a special command line switch strace can
> be forced to output JSON/XML/${anything standardized} to stderr, or it
> can be forced to bind to/create a socket and place the output in there.

In any case, it cannot be stdout or stderr because these descriptors are
shared with the tracee, and the latter can write there anything.

That is, any kind of structured output should go to a dedicated descriptor
or multiple descriptors not shared with traced processes.  The nature of
these descriptors may vary, they could be either created by strace or
inherited from the parent process, they just have to be dedicated for
structured output.

> I can come up with other ideas to extend this one, but I am afraid if
> it can make strace a little bit bloated.

No, this is a poor excuse, please do not hesitate to come up with ideas. :)


-- 
ldv