Re: XML structured output key names

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 05:00:40PM -0500, Daniel Miller wrote:
> > I think I'd prefer if everything was converted into the structured XML
> > format without having to opt-in (I might regret that once I see the output
> > from some scripts). The ssl-cert output shown at the wiki seems to magically
> > convert the string "Not valid before" to "notBefore" (I haven't looked at
> > the code yet to see how this is done, but I assume something's hardcoded in
> > an updated ssl-cert script). I presume that means other scripts (e.g.
> > smb-os-discovery) wouldn't automatically produce nice structured XML output
> > using the current code until someone adds the same sort of opt-in
> > information (e.g. "Computer name" to "computerName")? Is it possible to
> > automatically create the keys (e.g. camelCase).
> That particular example was a mock-up, and not actually output by
> any existing patch. David favors the camelCase key format, or at
> least one that results in a valid identifier in Lua.

No, I really dislike camel case, including in this instance. But what I
was trying to show in this example was a straightforward table
representation of what sslcert.getCertificate returns, which has camel
case keys because that's what OpenSSL gives us
(http://www.openssl.org/docs/crypto/OBJ_nid2obj.html#NOTES).

Nor do I think being a Lua identifier is important. Having dashes in
keys, for example, could be convenient. But I do think that we should
stick to things that are recognizably keys, and not things that look
like English text. For that reason "computername" and "computer_name"
and "computer-name" and "computerName" are better than "Computer name"
and "Computer Name". This output is supposed to be *machine-readable*,
and people shouldn't have to remember whether words are capitalized or
separated with spaces or what.

David Fifield
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