> On Fri, 27 Sept 2024, 10:30 demerphq, <demerphq@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> >> On Thu, 26 Sept 2024 at 23:04, brian m. carlson <sandals@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>> >>> On 2024-09-25 at 18:45:54, Sean Allred wrote: >>> > "brian m. carlson" <sandals@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: >>> > >>> > > On 2024-09-24 at 21:52:35, Ron Ziroby Romero wrote: >>> > >> What do y'all think? >>> > > >>> > > I think this is ultimately a bad idea. JSON requires that the output be >>> > > UTF-8, but Git processes a large amount of data, including file names, >>> > > ref names, commit messages, author and committer identities, diff >>> > > output, and other file contents, that are not restricted to UTF-8. >>> > >>> > This strikes me with a little bit of 'perfect as the enemy of good' >>> > here. I'm sure there are ways to signal an encoding failure. I would, >>> > however, caution against trying to provide diff output in JSON. That >>> > just seems... odd. Maybe base64 it first? (I don't know -- I just >>> > struggle to see the use-case here.) >>> >>> I understand JSON output would be useful, but it's also not useful to >>> randomly fail to do git for-each-ref (for example) because someone has a >>> non-UTF-8 ref, or to fail to do a git log because of encoding problems >> >> >> I dont really follow your argument, and I find it weird how you are talking about a specific encoding of unicode instead of Unicode itself. >> >> It is possible to represent every binary string as Unicode encoded as UTF-8 (or any of the UTF encodings). It may not be bytewise equivalent with the original, but why should that matter? There are a set of clear rules for doing the required transformations, and there is a huge body of tooling to do so. As long as you know the target encoding, you should be able to round trip data properly. >> >> IMO CBOR would just complicate what should be a relatively simple problem to solve. >> >> cheers, >> Yves >> >> >> >> -- >> perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/" Hi. I've been working with the code and trying to figure out how to do this. I've also started work on a formal proposal. Two things have come up that I wanted to discuss: First, I'm questioning my approach of hacking pretty.c with a series of 'if json' blocks. Would it be better to make a new file, json-log., and divorce myself from the pretty flow entirely? This would also go hand in hand with changing from "--pretty=json" to simply "--json" Second, I see that someone is adding a --json flag to git status[1]. I figure that argues for git log to use the --json flag. I don't think that affects me other than making the case for this JSON output. ## References [1] Patrick Steinhardt, “Re: [PATCH] diff: add --json output format,” message to git@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, July 29, 2025. https://public-inbox.org/git/pull.1937.git.1753856826464.gitgitgadget@xxxxxxxxx/ Thanks, Ziroby Ron Romero
