Re: libXO-ification - Why - and is it a symptom of deeper issues?

Hi Dan

> Meaning, is that simple to push things in head , if somone does the
> work, even with with no proper review of the problem at hand , and the
> proposed solutions ?

Not sure what sort of review you are looking for.
But I can speak to some of the history behind this.

FreeBSD holds regular "vendor summit" meetings where folk using FreeBSD
in products can get together - sort of a swap meet (I have this, I need
this ...).

At one such meeting at BSDCan 2011, I metioned that we (Juniper) had
tweaked many of the startard tools to output XML, and asked if anyone
else was interested in the facility.
I was frankly surprised at the number of hands raised.
There was clearly demand from a segment of the FreeBSD community.

The ability to get machine parsable output from OS components is a big
part of the success of Junos CLI, netconf etc.

It took a few years to get some time from phil_at_ to design a solution
that we could consider upstreaming - libxo was the result.
BTW this is a "problem space" that phil has been deeply involved in for
over 15 years, so yes I think we can say the problem has been studied.

That demand I mentioned? also resulted in a GSoC project to do the same
thing - though it was much like approach that Juniper had done over a
decade ago that we had considered unsuitable for upstreaming.
But it rather clearly demonstrates that there was demand beyond the whim
of a small group of folk or just one company pushing  something unwanted
into the project.
The number of developers who have jumped in to XO'ify apps also speaks
to that.

The original proposal was for XML only (that's what we'd used and found
useful), but others wanted JSON as well.
Libxo can also output very rich HTML - I forget which HTML or JSON, is
used but this allows some seriously slick UI's to be implemented using a
modern web browser.

Hope that helps
--sjg