GSOC: Structured output

[Dennis Borisevich]

> On Sun, 2 Mar 2014 13:22:28 +0100
> Philippe Ombredanne <pombredanne at nexb.com> wrote:
> With a command line flag to get a structured output the existing
> "classical" output would not be created at all in this case.

> One goal of a structured output could be to streamline the way output
> is created both for structured and classical output, IMHO such that
> formatting an output is not mixed with the actual decoding of the
> calls.

> On Sun, 2 Mar 2014 15:57:55 +0400
> "Dmitry V. Levin" <ldv at altlinux.org> wrote:
> In any case, it cannot be stdout or stderr because these descriptors
> are shared with the tracee, and the latter can write there anything.

By "outputting to stderr" I meant "in default way", sorry for
that.
Structured output could be enabled at will and either routed to
something (like existing "-o file" option), or replacing
classical output. In my mind, classical and structured output are not
meant to be mutually exclusive.

> No, this is a poor excuse, please do not hesitate to come up with
> ideas. :)

Well...what about the modularity of structured output types? E.q.
either at compile time ("--with-structured=json") or at runtime:

strace -o classic_out -j json=json_outfile,xml=xml_outfile executable

Outfiles are not ought to be regular files,of course.

Also, this idea is rather 'weak', but maybe a strace API could be done.
Given this one, third-party programs (IDE,debuggers?) could interact
with strace more closely, maybe getting needed results more quickly and
minimizing any parsing needed.
But I am unsure if this is needed at all, given the main goal of
"structured output" and the goal of strace itself.

P.S. My first name is Denis.
Borisevich is the last name :)