998104 - Add mach command to make it easier to extract configure/environment information in scripts

Status: NEW

(Firefox Build System :: General, defect)

Description

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

|mach environment| is great for humans, but not very good for machines.  I propose a |mach dump-environment KEY KEY KEY| command that just dumps configure defines/substs/whatever to the terminal for scripting, etc.

I considered rolling this into |mach environment|, but that has a decent amount of conditional logic that I don't want to route around.

Comment 1

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

Attachment: Add |mach dump-environment KEY| command. r=gps

The idea is to make it easier to extract configure/environment
information in local developer scripts.  Most importantly, this makes
easy to find the current topobjdir: |mach dump-environment topobjdir|.

I really don't care if we roll this into |mach environment|.  We just
need something like |mach environment| that is easy to parse from the
shell.

Comment 2

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

Argh, I see I called it dump-configure, not dump-environment.  Somebody paint this shed!

Comment 3

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

how about adding an option to mach environment to output a machine-readable format, instead?

Comment 4

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

(In reply to Mike Hommey [:glandium] from comment #3)
> how about adding an option to mach environment to output a machine-readable
> format, instead?

I wondered about that, dumping JSON or similar.  Comments about how special the environment command are still apply.  My case is really about shell, though -- almost any key/value dump is a pain to parse.

Comment 5

[Gregory Szorc [:gps]]

Comment on attachment 8408647 [details] [diff] [review]
Add |mach dump-environment KEY| command. r=gps

Review of attachment 8408647 [details] [diff] [review]:
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I'd add a flag to mach environment.

Comment 6

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

With bug 762358, mach environment has a new --format option that allows different kinds of output, one of which is json. If that's enough for you, then we can call that bug fixed. Note that this json output is also stored in $objdir/.mozconfig.json.

Comment 7

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

Oh, and mach environment --format=json --verbose outputs a json with even more info.

Comment 8

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

Comment on attachment 8408647 [details] [diff] [review]
Add |mach dump-environment KEY| command. r=gps

Oops, I left this sitting. I defer to gps. It sounds like glandium has you sorted, though.