Massive libxo-zation that breaks everything

[David Chisnall]

On 1 Mar 2015, at 21:29, Rui Paulo <rpaulo at me.com> wrote:
> 
> On Mar 1, 2015, at 11:11, David Chisnall <theraven at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
>> How would it be in a port?  It involves modifying core utilities (some of which, like ifconfig, rely on kernel APIs that change between releases) to emit structured output. Maintaining two copies of each utility, one in the base system with plain-text output only and another in ports with XML/JSON output would be very painful.
> 
> It would work fine if we had *libraries* for ifconfig/netstat/route/etc.  Obviously that's not the case and no one has stepped up to implement them.  I've also seen FreeBSD committers expressing their distaste for libraries for "trivial" command line utilities, which implies they are unaware of another world beyond the CLI.  :-)

I am completely in favour of libraries for the underlying functionality of these commands and would love to see all of the system management commands become thin wrappers around a library, though it's a lot of engineering work.  In particular, these libraries will need to have stable APIs that we can support across multiple major releases, and getting those right is difficult.  We really don't want to be stuck in 10 years maintaining a hastily designed API for a library.

I see one use of the libxo output as helping to design those APIs.  People are going to wrap various tools in libraries for their favourite scripting languages and this will give us a corpus for experimenting.

It's also worth noting that often invoking a tool and consuming its output is the easiest way to get a stable API and ABI where performance is not a primary concern (i.e. most management interfaces).

As to a world beyond the CLI, I saw a nice demo a few years ago of a terminal emulator that used WebKit and came with a hacked-up set of parsers for common tools.  I'd love to have something simpler (no need for a full WebKit - simple outline and table views would be enough and could be done with curses for ssh) for FreeBSD where I could type ls in the CLI and get a table view that I could then sort and filter by selecting column headings.  Those of us that have used Lisp and Smalltalk environments know that a CLI doesn't have to be a teletype emulator.

David