[Monotone-devel] Re: A Two-Fold Proposal: On Formats And Front-Ends

[Steven Grimm]

I'm all for a pipe- or socket-based interface between the frontend and
backend. It would make writing things like, say, an Eclipse plugin a
lot easier to do in a portable fashion.

If we end up with a shared library, then an Eclipse plugin -- or any other
Java/Python/Perl/Ruby/etc. monotone frontend -- will have to come packaged
with precompiled binaries for a zillion different platforms, or will
require the user to compile from source. Much nicer to simply ask the user
to enter the location of the Monotone binary (which will presumably, as
others have suggested, act like gcc in that it'll launch the backend for
you), run it with an option to say "pass my I/O through to the backend"
and talk to it via a pair of pipes using some well-defined protocol.

I have no particular opinion on the wire format. JSON seems fine. As
long as it's something that's either dead simple to parse or has a rich
library of existing parser code in lots of different languages, I don't
think that matters nearly as much as the higher-level architecture (e.g.
what is the granularity of the commands you issue over the pipe?)

-Steve