newby question: styling the hg status command

[Paul R]

Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com> writes:


> The output of status is already defined once and for good and it's a
> hell of a lot easier to parse than XML.

I'm afraid getting detailed information like what was copied or moved
is not so easy. As far as additions and deletions go, I consider
information provided by current output harder to parse, and requiring
its proper parser.

>
>> This is REQUIRED to integrate Mercurial with all those popular bug
>> tracking tools.
>
> Required? Hardly. Handy I'll grant.

So please grant also that the gap in integration with bug tracking
tools, between svn and hg, is mostly related to this feature. And this
gap is considerable for any tool I can think of.

> Our template language currently has
> exactly one deficit that prevents making a proper XML log output: we
> don't have a way to put a final end-of-changesets close tag on. That
> appears to be as easy as adding a destructor or done() method to the
> changeset_templater (and changeset_printer) classes in cmdutil.py.

I far as I know, template syntax has slightly changed recently, right?
As I mentionned in the previous post, every single tool out there
wanting mercurial to provide information has to write its own
template, or rather is own templateS, depending on the mercurial
version in use. Then, the tools need to tweak the lack of closing tag.
That's much work, for basically less info than svn --xml output. It's
a pita, sorry.

I like mercurial, and I'd like to be able to volonteer for that, but
I'm not the right person, unless I'm really the only one wanting it.
I do not doubt it's easily doable, so please anybody, do it. There are
already enought mercurial version in places that require special
tricks to get the data out, do not release one more. Thanks :)

-- 
      Paul