I see two problems with RUSTFLAGS to convey a request for JSON:
- rustc itself doesn't respect it, only cargo (we could change this)
- I see RUSTFLAGS as being more for humans to inject flags than tools, but I guess that's a relatively minor point; specifically, I expect people to do things like
make foo RUSTFLAGS="-g"which would then ignore any RUSTFLAGS settings installed by the editor.
But this will depend a lot on the environment. I am assuming a tool like emacs, where users may wish to specify their own build command, but we would like to silently control the output format. But this particular aspect of the discussion (how to select json output) feels like it belongs more to the original thread