Is there a way to get alembic to _return_ data rather than writing to a stream with the command module?

[MajorTanya]

Hi everyone,

I'm currently faced with the (to me) slightly frustrating situation that Alembic exposes its commands programmatically (cool!) but seemingly all of them forcibly print to an outstream, stdout by default (less cool).

For example, I'm currently writing a script that automatically writes the output of alembic history to a helper file so contributors can more easily understand the order of migration files (which are lexicographically sorted by the revision identifier obviously).

If there is a specific thing I can use to get the list of revisions as a list or something like it in Python, that'd be cool. But if I could somehow get command.history(...) to return its output instead of forcibly writing to the stream I specify in the config object, that'd also be neat.

If not, I'd like to take this opportunity to ask why these force-prints are the operation of choice for Alembic since it seems odd to me (but I may be missing some very important context, so it's not a finger waggling angry me saying this!).

Thank you for your excellent work on Alembic, I would be in a lot more pain without it. ❤️

[CaselIT]

Hi,

Alembic is primarily a clip application so the default is to interact with a stream.

History in particular is mostly just printing the output of wark_revisions, so if you want the objects the best way is likely to use that method