[Buildroot] [PATCH 09/12 v2] core: introduce new global show-info

[Arnout Vandecappelle]

On 16/04/2019 11:47, Peter Korsgaard wrote:
>>>>>> "Arnout" == Arnout Vandecappelle <arnout at mind.be> writes:
> 
>  > On 14/04/2019 22:17, Yann E. MORIN wrote:
>  >> Users are increasingly trying to extract information about packages. For
>  >> example, they might need to get the list of URIs, or the dependencies of
>  >> a package.
>  >> 
>  >> Although we do have a bunch of rules to generate some of that, this is
>  >> done in ad-hoc way, with most of the output formats just ad-hoc, raw,
>  >> unformatted blurbs, mostly internal data dumped as-is.
>  >> 
>  >> Introduce a new rule, show-info, that provides a properly formatted
>  >> output of all the meta-information about packages: name, type, version,
>  >> licenses, dependencies...
>  >> 
>  >> We choose to use JSON as the output format, because it is pretty
>  >> versatile, has parsers in virtually all languages, has tools to parse
>  >> from the shell (jq).
> 
>  >  Actually, OpenWrt has a couple of bash functions to convert JSON into bash
>  > variables. If we start making extensive use of show-info, it might be worth
>  > copying that.
> 
> That should be pretty trivial to do with jq, E.G. something like:
> 
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25378013/how-to-convert-a-json-object-to-key-value-format-in-jq

 Yes, but then jq needs to be installed. The point is to be able to use the
show-info output in our own shell scripts without requiring an additional
package to be installed.

 Regards,
 Arnout