It sounds worse than it is. ;)
Some external special remotes may run commands that display progress on
stderr. If git-annex is run with --quiet, this should filter out such
displays while letting the errors through.
Came up with a generic way to filter out progress messages while keeping
errors, for commands that use stderr for both.
--json mode will disable command outputs too.
This includes a generic JSONStream library built on top of Text.JSON
(somewhat hackishly).
It would be possible to stream out a single json document describing
all actions, but it's probably better for consumers if they can expect
one json document per line, so I did it that way instead.
Output from external programs used for transferring files is not
currently hidden when outputting json, which probably makes it not very
useful there. This may be dealt with if there is demand for json
output for --get or --move to be parsable.
The version, status, and find subcommands have hand-crafted output and
don't do json. The whereis subcommand needs to be modified to produce
useful json.
