Proposal: --json output for pixi publish --dry-run

[thomas-lemma]

This is a small follow-up related to Proposal: Version override argument for pixi publish, motivated by CI use cases.

Context. pixi publish --dry-run already resolves and prints the package(s) that would be built, including the resolved version. Output, for example:

no package sets `publish = true`; publishing the package at the current directory
Would build 1 package(s):
  - foo v0.1.2 [pyh4616a5c_0] (noarch)
Dry run: nothing was built or uploaded

This is exactly the information generic CI scripts often need, for example to tag artifacts with the resolved package version. However, extracting the version currently requires grepping the rich-text output:

ver=$(pixi publish --dry-run 2>&1 | grep -oP '(?<= v)[^ ]+(?= \[)')

This is fragile — any change to the human-readable format might break the script.

Question. Would a --json flag (or similar, e.g. --format=json) on pixi publish --dry-run to support machine parsing fit the direction of the tooling? This would allow more robust CI workflows, e.g. using jq:

ver=$(pixi publish --dry-run --json | jq -r '.packages[0].version')

This kind of flag typically coexists cleanly with the default human-readable output, as seen in tools like kubectl -o json or pip list --format=json.

Happy to discuss this further if it seems worth exploring. Thanks a lot!