Re: machine-readable explain output v4

Csaba Nagy wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-08-12 at 15:42 +0200, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>
>> Have you actually looked at a logfile with this in it? A simple
>> stylesheet won't do at all. What you get is not an XML document but a
>> text document with little bits of XML embedded in it. So you would need
>> a program to parse that file and either turn it into a single legal XML
>> document or pass each piece of XML individually to your XSLT processor.
>> Bleah.
>>
>
> I'm pretty sure you will never find a human readable format which is
> easily extracted from the logs by a program. But if you format the XML
> in a (very human unreadable) one-line-without-breaks format then it will
> be a lot easier extracted by a program and formatted at your will.
>

That will just make things worse. And it will break if the XML includes
any expression that contains a line break.

>
>> And all this because you pose a false dichotomy between correctness and
>> completeness on one hand and human readability on the other. I don't
>> accept that at all. I think we can and should improve human readability
>> without sacrificing anything on the correctness and completeness front.
>> In fact, that also needs improving, and we can do them both at the same
>> time.
>>
>
> I really really doubt that. I would go here on the UNIX approach of
> piping the things through the right tools, each one doing a simple and
> good job for it's single and well defined purpose. So let the explain
> spit out a line of XML without much thought about formatting but
> focusing on completeness, making it easy for tools to get that line, and
> then let the tools do the formatting depending on what you want to do
> with the information. Each part will be simpler than you would put in a
> directly human readable XML (if that's possible at all) approach, which
> will anyway not cover all the uses and tastes.
>

I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on this. I think you're
going in precisely the wrong direction.

I repeat, I want to be able to have a log file that is both machine
processable and not utterly unreadable by a human. And I do not accept
at all that this is impossible. Nor do I accept I should need some extra
processing tool to read the machine processable output without suffering
brain damage. If we were to adopt your approach I bet you would find
that nobody in their right mind would use the machine readable formats.

I sure wouldn't.

cheers

andrew