Ack, my reply got kinda garbled by hasty revisions -- one more time: > > You are right - expecting a common set of code is probably not > > worthwhile, but having a common grammar/format (IMO) still is.
I think it's worthwhile too, but this case is considerably more modest in its goals: we simply want dladm to be easy to parse in the shell and with other simple-minded traditional Unix utilities. We believe the simple approach we're proposing with this case is generally applicable to future utilities and thus would encourage others inventing parsable output modes that need to be shell-friendly to follow the same approach. We also expect that future networking CLIs we're working on (flowadm, ipmpstat, lbadm, ...) will look quite similar, but that's as far as we're comfortable going given both the political and technical obstacles (not just in terms of legacy code, but in terms of differing requirements) that stand in the way of a truly uniform solution. -- meem
