[GSoC] Machine readable output from userland utilities

[Erik Cederstrand]

Den 21/05/2014 kl. 18.18 skrev Alfred Perlstein <bright at mu.org>:
> That sounds reasonable.  Is there a link to the specifics we can have?

I'm surprised that I couldn't find anything written in the Developers' Handbook or elsewhere. From what I gather, it's along the lines of:

* Don't break the API in the duration of a major release. Additional features may be added in minor releases.
* Mark an API for deprecation in the next major release, and remove it in the next major release after that.
* API changes should try to adhere to POLA.
* The policy is not strict and may be violated for e.g. security reasons.

For convenience, a utility could announce the API version in the output (something comparable to symbol versioning for shared libs), but a simpler solution would simply require scripts to check which FreeBSD release they are running on before making assumptions about the XML/JSON output. Just like Python scripts that support different Python versions must handle version differences manually.

Erik