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Subject: [bug#30053] [PATCH 1/3] Improve appearance of tabular output.
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From: ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic =?UTF-8?Q?Court=C3=A8s?=)
References: <CA+xn8YBKpjVYmrhKbR7Y=wZnnfr+ALuEMHo_b5AEFMAOTEkDxA@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2018 22:32:29 +0100
In-Reply-To: <CA+xn8YBKpjVYmrhKbR7Y=wZnnfr+ALuEMHo_b5AEFMAOTEkDxA@mail.gmail.com>
	(Steve Sprang's message of "Tue, 9 Jan 2018 14:34:46 -0800")
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To: Steve Sprang <steve.sprang@gmail.com>
Cc: 30053@debbugs.gnu.org

Hello Steve,

Long time no see!  ;-)

Steve Sprang <steve.sprang@gmail.com> skribis:

> I noticed when listing installed or available packages that the output
> is often pretty jumbled up because columns in each row have an
> inconsistent width.
>
> This series of patches adds a new procedure for printing tabular data
> (pretty-print-table) and modifies the code for --list-installed,
> --list-available, and --list-generations to utilize it.

I have a disappointing explanation I=E2=80=99m afraid: the reason columns l=
ook
this way is because they are tab-separated, which in turn makes it easy
to filter with =E2=80=98cut=E2=80=99:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
$ guix package -A | cut -f1 | head
0ad
0ad-data
0xffff
4store
4ti2
a2ps
aalib
abbaye
abc
abcde
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

An example from the manual (info "(guix) Invoking guix build"):

     guix build --quiet --keep-going \
       `guix package -A | cut -f1,2 --output-delimiter=3D@`

The idea was to have this shell-scripting-friendly format, and to
provide fancier output in other commands, such as --search (which is in
fact script-friendly as well thanks to recutils).

Silly? Awesome? Ugly? What do people think?  :-)

Thank you,
Ludo=E2=80=99.