Re: wc(1) Output and POSIX

[Alistair Crooks <agc%pkgsrc.org@localhost>]

While I don't doubt that different output formats are useful - see the
Juniper fluff at http://juniper.github.io/libxo/libxo-manual.html -- the
mechanics involved in getting there are not obvious, convoluted, intrusive
and difficult to get right -- see the manual page at
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=libxo&apropos=0&sektion=3&manpath=FreeBSD+11-current&format=html

I keep thinking "there must be a better way", mainly because we don't need
xml (again, if the answer is xml, it's a pretty stupid question), and
converting between json and human format is done better by other libraries.

On 27 December 2016 at 10:01, Christos Zoulas <christos%astron.com@localhost> wrote:

> In article <CAHwRYJmOTZHK6R=nc0czT2Uy=w5CvmycZqcVdUyVHNsU5UPATQ@mail.
> gmail.com>,
> Abhinav Upadhyay  <er.abhinav.upadhyay%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
> >On Tue, Dec 27, 2016 at 9:25 PM, Christos Zoulas <christos%astron.com@localhost>
> wrote:
> >> In article
> ><CAHwRYJnCSvd4q7+O2nAeGjXT8Gm=6WZxJLfi7Cqx4XAibppFfQ%mail.gmail.com@localhost>,
> >> Abhinav Upadhyay  <er.abhinav.upadhyay%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
> >>>On Tue, Dec 27, 2016 at 1:44 AM, Robert Elz <kre%munnari.oz.au@localhost> wrote:
> >>>> The last time I saw this discussed, I think that the conclusion was
> >>>> that where posix specifies a space, other wording permits any number
> >>>> of spaces.   That means that we comply.
> >>>
> >>>Yes, that makes sense for the %7lu, but what about the leading space
> >>>in the first column?
> >>
> >> We could get rid of it, but if we are going to touch wc, we could go
> >> the FreeBSD way, add libxo etc... But that opens a bigger discussion...
> >
> >Yes, I had a look at FreeBSD's wc(1), they use libxo.
> >
> >libxo looks nice actually and seems very useful. For example,
> >apropos(1) has an API to generate HTML output. For man-k.org I had to
> >create a similar API to generate JSON output (not committed).
> >Something like libxo would make this very easy :)
>
> Well, if people think that we should bring in libxo, let's vote. I vote
> yes :-)
>
> christos
>
>