Re: [libvirt] [PATCHv4 1/2] virsh: add new --details option to pool-list

On Thu, Jul 01, 2010 at 11:42:12AM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: > On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 09:58:34AM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote: > > On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 12:35:32PM -0600, Eric Blake wrote: > > > On 06/22/2010 12:24 PM, Hugh O. Brock wrote: > > > >> Correct, we shouldn't change this behaviour - it'll break apps parsing > > > >> the output > > > > > > > > FWIW Rich Jones complains that the output as it stands is nigh on > > > > unparseable anyway. Perhaps we should consider that a bug, and fix > > > > it... > > > > > > The new --details option is our chance to change output - it outputs > > > whatever format we want, because it is a new flag; Rich, do you have any > > > preferences about what it _should_ output? > > > > --details is still targetted at humans. If you want something more > > easily parseable it should use a structured format like CSV. So I > > don't think we should be overloading --details for this purpose. > > CSV is a good format, but beware the many ways to shoot yourself in > the foot. I recommend using my program "csvtool" (in Fedora/Debian) > which can fully and safely parse CSV output from shell scripts, or use > a library (eg. Text::CSV for Perl, or csv for Python). More about > this subject here: > > http://libguestfs.org/virt-df.1.html#note_about_csv_format > > Rich. If we're going to go to all this trouble, how much more difficult would it be to implement something like ps -o and give the user control of the format?