future of HgKit

[Andrey Somov]

Smith, Michael wrote:
> (butting in, sorry for the noise)
> 
> Andrey: "parsing stdout is not very convenient"
> 
> Why not? I do it all the time from many languages, including Java. Matt 
> has repeatedly stated on this list he wants the shell interface to be as 
> stable as possible. I have many tools which call mercurial. They are 
> stable and rarely break when hg is upgraded. The shell interface is 
> arguably more stable than the backend storage.
> 

stdout is designed to be human friendly. There are extensions which 
change stdout to be more reabable.
You may change a Mercurial setting which affects stdout for one project 
to do a specific task from command line. And then you can spend days 
trying to find out why suddenly Mercurial does not work properly for 
another project in Eclipse.
The fact that is works now does not guaranty it is going to work with 
another Mercurial release or with a new version of an extension.
Matt suggests it not because this is the best option but because this is 
   no other alternative.

stdout is not bad it is vulnerable. If because of whatever reason you 
need to introduce a minor change for stdout (even the backend storage 
may change!) the transition becomes very painful for the applications.
I think there is a general vision that RPC would serve a better job here.