[darcs-users] Re: Programmatic invocation

[Max Battcher]

Jamie Webb wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 02, 2005 at 08:46:21PM +0100, Olivier Lefevre wrote:
>> Yes I was thinking of it in a GUI context.
>>
>> There is a third option you have not considered: communicating over a 
>> bi-directional socket using a custom wire protocol. In practice that 
>> still amounts to designing an API but implementation-wise that should be 
>> much easier.
> 
> I very much doubt it's easier to implement, but it is a lot more
> platform-independent than providing a C API. I'd recommend using
> something well-known such as XML-RPC rather than a custom protocol
> though.

You could do one further and build a pure XML-based API.  Most of the 
commands can already produce an --xml-output, why not create some smart 
looking --xml-input?  Then you could use it for server-less command line 
scripting as well as running XML-RPC-style requests with a simple 
XML-RPC to --xml-input listener server.

-- 
--Max Battcher--
http://www.worldmaker.net/