BIND segway -> python -> first-class ports

[Alfred Perlstein]

> On Dec 8, 2013, at 9:13 PM, "Daniel O'Connor" <doconnor at gsoft.com.au> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On 9 Dec 2013, at 11:22, Darren Pilgrim <list_freebsd at bluerosetech.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> On 12/8/2013 11:02 AM, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
>>> So if I were going to task the talented Devin Teske with something,
>>> remember you just asked my opinion, then it would be to look at
>>> putting Lua in the boot loader, getting python into base, or working
>>> on making our utilities be able to output standard machine readable
>>> formats such as yaml, XML and json.
>> 
>> Can you cite a real-world example of a general-purpose OS where this was beneficial?  Beneficial here means otherwise impossible functionality or automation gains without adding barriers for low-level diagnostics, tuning, corner-case configurations and other modes of advanced control.
> 
> It is not that parsing the human readable output of the tools is impossible, it's that it's tedious bullshit code that you shouldn't have to write in the first place.
> 
> I would kill for a way to be able to do something like..
> output=`somecmd -J`
> foo=`jsonextract -f some.field $output`
> bar=`jsonextract -f another.field.here $output`
> 
> Even nicer would be if the shell could do it internally so you didn't have to re-parse it all the time but it's a start :)
> 
> (I don't care if it's JSON, XML or smoke signals just so long as it isn't hideously slow).
> 

You have described exactly what we are trying to accomplish. Thank you!