aydwi / barrel Goto Github PK

Instead of dumping a std::string of stream output to the client, Barrel can do some processing based on the exact brew command it executed and return, for example a neat std::unordered_map or other various (applicable) types.

This feature is not finalized because:

1. It violates the "one job" philosophy.
2. It comes with a subjective choice of C++ types and might force advanced clients to do ugly casting, which defeats the entire idea of doing it in the first place.
3. It cannot be fool-proof or comprehensive. brew does dynamic things with certain commands which cannot all be encapsulated before execution (at least with any reasonable effort).
   
   

But it could still be useful for people who want a baked cake instead of the ingredients.

This feature will not be a part of the inital release, but will remain open for further thought till a decision is made.

Barrel can retrieve the stdout/stderr dump for a brew command after it has finished executing, but it should also have the ability to retrieve/poll the output of a command as it is executing.

There are some use cases where this feature can be extremely useful:

1. Many brew commands can take a long time to execute, so live output can help keep track of what's going on.

2. One might not always want to store a large output buffer.

3. It would be nice to have a GUI tool using Barrel be able to display the output of a command as it executes, instead of dumping at once after several seconds. Cakebrew, the most popular Homebrew GUI is unable to do this at the moment.