Add a global `--format` option for machine-readable output

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
42/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
python
Domain
cli

Research direction

Start at the global bst command entry point and trace how the current human-readable logging is selected. The work is complete when --format supports the described pretty, minimal, and json behaviors globally while preserving the current output as the default.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

As discussed in the matrix channel

Right now there is only one format of logging which is very nice and human-readable, but, unfortunately, machine unreadable. This issue is set up to make it possible to set up an output format using a --format flag.

In the matrix channel several formats were proposed:

--format=pretty

This would be the default format and it would map to the current style of output that buildstream does

--format=minimal

This output format would output only the text, no formatting, no padding, no fancy unicode symbols. This format would be useful in making short pipes into bash utilities. Like

bst --format=minimal artifact list-contents my-component.bst | as-tree
--format=json

This output format would be useful in more complex tooling, such as nushell or even scripts that wrap bst, so that building tooling around bst becomes possible, like so:

#[derive(Deserialize)]
struct Message {
    // potential message fields
}

fn main() {
    let mut child = Command::new("bst")
        .arg("--format=json")
        .arg("build")
        .stdout(Stdio::piped())
        .stderr(Stdio::inherit())
        .spawn()
        .expect("failed to spawn bst");

    let stdout = child.stdout.take().unwrap();
    for line in BufReader::new(stdout).lines().map_while(Result::ok) {
        // handling messages from bst
    }

    let status = child.wait().expect("bst process lost");
    std::process::exit(status.code().unwrap_or(1));
}
Dominant language
Python
Stars
144
Forks
45
Avg merge
20h 38m
Merged PRs (30d)
6

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