Hi Cassandra users, I am a Cassandra developer and we in Cassandra project would love to know if there are users out there for whom the output of the tooling, like, nodetool, is important when it comes to parsing it.
We are elaborating on the consequences when nodetool's output for various commands is changed - we are not completely sure if users are parsing this output in some manner in their custom scripts so us changing the output would break their scripts which are parsing it. Additionally, how big of a problem the output change would be if it was happening only between major Cassandra versions? E.g. 4.0 -> 5.0 or 5.0 -> 6.0 only. In other words, there would be a guarantee that no breaking changes in minor versions would ever occur. Only in majors. Is somebody out there who is relying on the output of some particular nodetool commands (or any command in tools/bin) in production? How often do you rely on the parsing of nodetool's output and how much work it would be for you to rework some minor changes? For example, when the tool output prints "someStatistic: 10" and we would rework it to "Some Statistic: 10". Would you be OK if the output changed but you would have a way how to get e.g. JSON or YAML output instead by some flag on nodetool command so it would be irrelevant what the default output would be? It would be appreciated a lot if you gave us more feedback on this. I understand that not all questions are relatable to everyone. Even you are not relying on the output of the tooling in some custom scripts where you parse it, please tell us so. We are progressively trying to provide CQL way how to query the internal state of Cassandra, via virtual tables, for example. Regards Stefan Miklosovic
