Unifying I/O interfaces (dbus, json, etc)

[exquo]

Would it be feasible to unify the various APIs (dbus, json, "free-form" stdout) by making signal-cli "core" to return objects (e.g. envelopes) that would be passed to simple I/O modules which would serialize them to whatever format is needed?

Keeping different interfaces consistent is hard, and the discrepancies inevitably turn up, not to mention the documented differences (the subject of this wiki page). If signal-cli limits its inputs and outputs to common data structures (arrays, dicts, etc), which can easily be translated to other formats, there would be no need to worry about any differences.

I'm sure to a large extent this is how signal-cli already operates. I'm also sure adapting the rest can come against some potentially hard issues:

• unifying the daemon / CLI modes (maybe: make CLI a daemon that lives for one command only?)
• specifying free-form stdout stuff that does not fit into typical data structure formats
• outputting notifications, errors and everything else that is not a signal message
• .. and many more that haven't occurred to me at the moment.

This is a far-from-any-practicalities, "wouldn't that be great" kind of proposal; and I haven't examined any relevant code. But, if this is possible, signal-cli will be able to implement any new feature without ever thinking about the differences among various interfaces.