[FR] - Make output of CLI commands consistent.

[carbolymer]

Internal/External
Internal if an IOHK staff member.

Area
Other Any other topic (Delegation, Ranking, ...).

Describe the feature you'd like
Currently the output format of the CLI commands may depend on multiple things and sometimes is not deterministic. This may surprise the users and lead to a poor user experience (like in #537 ).

An example is cardano-cli conway query ledger-state:

cardano-cli/cardano-cli/src/Cardano/CLI/EraBased/Run/Query.hs

Line 903 in 17355f3

case mOutFile of

where the output format depends on where you would like to send it (binary CBOR for file, json for stdout) and if there was and error when decoding it (plain CBOR when error occurred during CBOR deserialization into JSON).

A one way to make it consistent across the whole CLI is to use similar output flags to transaction-view like in #523.

[Jimbo4350]

We are toying with the idea of exposing the remaining mini-protocols via an HTTP server. We currently have the cardano-submit-api which exposes transaction submission in this fashion and we could do the same for node queries etc. This also allows us to generate an OpenAPI spec "for free" with https://hackage.haskell.org/package/servant-openapi3 and we can reuse these JSON instances in the cardano-cli which also inherits an OpenAPI spec "for free".

[github-actions]

This issue is stale because it has been open 30 days with no activity. Remove stale label or comment or this will be closed in 120 days.

[smelc]

Witnessing with @CarlosLopezDeLara today that era transaction txid would benefit of adding --output-json and --output-text.

[smelc]

#982 shows that hash genesis-file would also benefit of this improvement