[pacman-dev] [PATCH v3 2/2] Add -F --machinereable option

[Florian Pritz]

On Fri, 30 Oct 2015 13:59:53 -0400 Andrew Gregory
<andrew.gregory.8 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Aside from a few style nitpicks, the code looks fine.  I am curious as
> to the motivation for this though.  Most of our operations are made
> easier to parse by using --quiet to reduce the output to a single
> field.  Do you have a use case in mind for this that wouldn't be taken
> care of by adding a --quiet option to -F or intend to add
> --machinereadable to other operations?

Depending on what you want at least -Fs produces some very hard to
parse output as you can see here:

> src/pacman/pacman -Fs makepkg
core/pacman 4.2.1-4
    usr/bin/makepkg
    usr/share/bash-completion/completions/makepkg
community/libreoffice-extension-texmaths 0.41-2
    usr/lib/libreoffice/share/extensions/texmaths/makepkg
community/plan9port 20150629-1
    usr/lib/plan9/.git/logs/refs/heads/makepkg
    usr/lib/plan9/.git/refs/heads/makepkg

-Fqs is easier to parse but provides only very limited information:

> src/pacman/pacman -Fqs makepkg
core/pacman
community/libreoffice-extension-texmaths
community/plan9port

Also the format is not consistent across -F operations so any code that
parses one format can not be used for the others which seems
unnecessary.

I brought this up when Allan created the feature and he asked me to
create a dedicated switch so I did. If you know of any operations that
could benefit from such an option I might consider implementing it,
however, expac already covers most of the normal stuff and I don't
know if pacman can do a better job there. I certainly can with the -F
operations.

I fixed the style issues and the subject typo mentioned by Pierre in my
branch.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 801 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/attachments/20151030/6521ab4a/attachment.asc>