[lttng-dev] Machine Interface

[Jonathan Rajotte]

Hello all,

After speaking with Michel Dagenais, Geneviève Bastien, folks over at EfficiOs
and Ericsson, a machine interface for lttng-tool would be a nice feature
to have. Olivier Cotte and me will be working on MI for the
next few weeks.

The main objective would be to reduce parsing complexity
in control tools.
ex:Regex used in TMF control service.
(org.eclipse.linuxtools.internal.lttng2.ui.views.control.service.LTTngControlService.java)

Multiples solutions come to mind:
-XML
-JSON
-YAML
-Custom syntax (like GDB Machine interface* as proposed by Alexandre
				Montplaisir)

XML/JSON/YAML promote extensibility and ease of development for new tools
dependant on lttng-tools by being established standards.
On the other hand, they add dependencies to lttng-tools where a custom syntax
would not.

Machine interface output would be generated only with --mi option and
could contain additional information than regular output.

We are focusing on output right now but we may eventually add a 'mi'
command for input if necessary.

What do you think ?

Thanks


*https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/GDB_002fMI.html

-- 
Jonathan Rajotte Julien
Chargé de laboratoire INF1995
Membre MD6
Polytechnique Montréal