Thank you Brandon for further clarification of your position on this. While I get the necessity of being compatible is real, I just find the fact that we need to do this across majors to be just too much. Are we all aware that if we can not change it, this is just a snowball getting bigger over time? After long enough period, it will be so "conserved" that it will be detrimental to the usability as it will be also hard to parse just visually.
There is just no clear path how to improve that over time and exposing the same output via different format is not really solving it ... the discrepancies are still there. I welcome other people to this thread to tell us about how they are parsing it, how frequently, how important is that for them. As I said before, I have never met anybody who is parsing this output and it actually matters to them. Do we have some proof this is happening in scale? ________________________________________ From: Brandon Williams <dri...@gmail.com> Sent: Friday, July 7, 2023 20:39 To: dev@cassandra.apache.org Subject: Re: Changing the output of tooling between majors NetApp Security WARNING: This is an external email. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe. On Fri, Jul 7, 2023 at 10:21 AM Miklosovic, Stefan <stefan.mikloso...@netapp.com> wrote: > > Anyway, the main question here is if we are OK to change the output in majors. I think we always want to strive for compatibility whenever possible. My personal litmus test is "can this information be obtained elsewhere?" and if the answer is no, then the format shouldn't change as it is very likely to at least cause friction for anyone screen scraping to get it programmatically. However, as you mentioned, adding a serialized format provides another, superior method of programmatic access, freeing us of the issues with cosmetic changes.
