[Monotone-devel] Re: Is there something like libmonotone?

[Bruce Stephens]

Nathaniel Smith <address@hidden> writes:

> On Fri, Jan 28, 2005 at 08:48:42PM -0500, graydon hoare wrote:
>> the former problem I'd prefer to address by making all the output 
>> functions in monotone invoke a lua hook when it's present. this way you 
>> could redefine the output to look however you like, by providing an 
>> extra lua file as a command line argument. if you wanted it to look like 
>> xml, you could write hooks which dump out xml. none of my business.
>
> Hmm, this sounds finicky and complicated to me too, and interacts
> badly with, e.g., poeple's desire to have command-line verbosity
> specifications (do they change the default hooks, or?).  I'm
> especially not enthused about going through and coming up with the
> proper function signatures for all the lua hooks we'd need, and then
> having that be an external interface to support...

Yes, I was going to make much the same comment: 99% of the problem is
working out what things are being printed out.  Exactly the syntax
that's used is really not likely to be interesting enough to justify
lua hooks.

A suitable example is possible gdb, and the way that emacs and gdb
interact.  When you run gdb with the --annotate=<n> flag (with <n> not
0), gdb displays information in a defined format, suitable for a
program to parse.

The gdb example suggests another idea: there might be an interactive
mode for monotone.  I'm not sure whether that's worthwhile, especially
for Unix, but it might be worth considering, should performance be an
issue.