[Lognorm] liblognorm API changes

[david at lang.hm]

On Sun, 26 Aug 2012, Rainer Gerhards wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> as you probably know, liblognorm uses libee as its "base data model 
> library". Libee was created based on a now quite old CEE spec, on that 
> has considerably changed in the mean time.
>
> Today, it looks like a simple JSON object model would take care of the 
> CEE needs - and many more. Rsyslog is also moving towards that model. So 
> I am tempted to modify the next major version of liblognorm to no longer 
> be based on libee but rather directly on the json-c (often packaged as 
> libjson0) library object model. That would of course mean that in order 
> to use new versions the caller apps needs to be modified. I wouldn't 
> expect that much code needs to be changed, but that of course depends.
>
> I have not made up my mind. But I'd appreciate feedback from liblognorm 
> users (Champ? ;)) as one of the decision factors.

This changes liblognorm from a generic parsing library to a JSON parsing 
library.

That may be a very common case for the expected use, but I think it's far 
from being the only case for this library.

I think the key thing that you are looking to support going forward that 
was not supported before is hierarctical structure support.

Other than the "assume it's JSON and parse accordingly", what sort of 
syntax are you thinking of using to define nesting in the pattern 
matching?

What do will you do if the nesting doesn't match JSON (multiple things at 
the same level with the same name, arrays, etc)

David Lang