[Feature] - JSON Output

[nickhayhurst-interact]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

No - my feature request is not related to a problem.

Describe the solution you'd like

Something I have always figured would be a benefit to openSeaChest, is a global "JSON" output format.

openSeaChest provides great data, and in many cases, data that other tools does not provide.

Please consider implementing an output format for openSeaChest in the JSON format.

--outputFormat=json

Describe alternatives you've considered

Tools like smartmontools provide a JSON output format for their toolkit - hdsentinel for Linux provides an XML output - which could be another alternative output format.

Additional context

No further additional context. :)

[nickhayhurstdev]

Hey @vonericsen

Hope you are well.

Is JSON this available for any testing? Happy to support on testing here! 👍

Thanks.

[vonericsen]

@nickhayhurstdev,

I'm doing well and I hope you are too!

JSON support is in progress. #232 is part of integrating that support. #231 is another part of pulling in JSON output.
We've been working through some issues with the json-c library and assessing the CI jobs.
I ended up forking it and submitting some pull requests back to the main project which resolve some of the issues.

One issue we are hitting and trying to decide what to do with is in regards to the makefiles we still preserve. Those builds fail in the CI and we do not know why (they work locally, just not in the CI). We do have some need to maintain them since we occasionally need to support something more rare like AIX or ESXI which don't have meson targets or the ability to build with meson.
Most likely we'll implement some kind of flag to turn support on or off for now with it defaulting to on for meson based builds.

I want to get JSON support completed for our next release....no exact timeline yet, but before the end of the year is the target that I have in mind.

[nickhayhurst-interact]

@vonericsen

This is all sounding great (minus the CI issues!) - keen to hear more of this when ready - do give me a shout or ping me in this ticket if you get chance, and I would be glad to test the feature out when it is ready.

Thanks