chriseldredge/openwrap — comment on commit 0b8afafe47f8880d228605f0dae36d7f1ca76f0a
File:  line 0
By serialseb:

Well there's two sides to this.

One is irrelevant data in recursive dependencies, and if we show too much data I'd suggest opening a bug and proposing an alternative syntax, this would be useful for everyone and may be highlighting an issue with the current scheme.

The second is the general problem of showing hierarchical data in a way that's text processing friendly. If it's an important scenario we should try and resolve that too in the commands, or more likely in a more unified fashion. The current tree rendering code in list-wrap should be extracted into something more general, which would let us have pluggable renderers. This would allow us to send data as json / xml / table / tree / list on most commands out of the box, a feature that'd be damn useful.

Is simply replacing the tree entries with spaces enough for grep to be happy? How are tools that are expected to work with grep usually presenting their text stream?