Merge pull request NixOS#7883 from hercules-ci/json-guidelines

cli-guideline: Add JSON guideline

doc/manual/src/contributing/cli-guideline.md

@@ -389,6 +389,88 @@ colors, no emojis and using ASCII instead of Unicode symbols). The same should
 happen when TTY is not detected on STDERR. We should not display progress /
 status section, but only print warnings and errors.
 
+## Returning future proof JSON
+
+The schema of JSON output should allow for backwards compatible extension. This section explains how to achieve this.
+
+Two definitions are helpful here, because while JSON only defines one "key-value"
+object type, we use it to cover two use cases:
+
+ - **dictionary**: a map from names to value that all have the same type. In
+   C++ this would be a `std::map` with string keys.
+ - **record**: a fixed set of attributes each with their own type. In C++, this
+   would be represented by a `struct`.
+
+It is best not to mix these use cases, as that may lead to incompatibilities when the schema changes. For example, adding a record field to a dictionary breaks consumers that assume all JSON object fields to have the same meaning and type.
+
+This leads to the following guidelines:
+
+ - The top-level (root) value must be a record.
+
+   Otherwise, one can not change the structure of a command's output.
+
+ - The value of a dictionary item must be a record.
+
+   Otherwise, the item type can not be extended.
+
+ - List items should be records.
+
+   Otherwise, one can not change the structure of the list items.
+
+   If the order of the items does not matter, and each item has a unique key that is a string, consider representing the list as a dictionary instead. If the order of the items needs to be preserved, return a list of records.
+
+ - Streaming JSON should return records.
+
+   An example of a streaming JSON format is [JSON lines](https://jsonlines.org/), where each line represents a JSON value. These JSON values can be considered top-level values or list items, and they must be records.
+
+### Examples
+
+
+This is bad, because all keys must be assumed to be store implementations:
+
+```json
+{
+  "local": { ... },
+  "remote": { ... },
+  "http": { ... }
+}
+```
+
+This is good, because the it is extensible at the root, and is somewhat self-documenting:
+
+```json
+{
+  "storeTypes": { "local": { ... }, ... },
+  "pluginSupport": true
+}
+```
+
+While the dictionary of store types seems like a very complete response at first, a use case may arise that warrants returning additional information.
+For example, the presence of plugin support may be crucial information for a client to proceed when their desired store type is missing.
+
+
+
+The following representation is bad because it is not extensible:
+
+```json
+{ "outputs": [ "out" "bin" ] }
+```
+
+However, simply converting everything to records is not enough, because the order of outputs must be preserved:
+
+```json
+{ "outputs": { "bin": {}, "out": {} } }
+```
+
+The first item is the default output. Deriving this information from the outputs ordering is not great, but this is how Nix currently happens to work.
+While it is possible for a JSON parser to preserve the order of fields, we can not rely on this capability to be present in all JSON libraries.
+
+This representation is extensible and preserves the ordering:
+
+```json
+{ "outputs": [ { "outputName": "out" }, { "outputName": "bin" } ] }
+```
+
 ## Dialog with the user
 
 CLIs don't always make it clear when an action has taken place. For every