On 10 May 2016 at 18:54, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:
Well, IMO, the state of things in terms of config file formats (and not just in Python) is itself pretty dreadful - every time I write an application, I am astounded that there are no good options for something as basic as a configuration file format.
This is pretty normal for software - no good options, but a plethora of "good enough" ones. Hence https://xkcd.com/927/ :) We just have a particularly exacting use case here, since we want: - a format that's attractive for folks just learning to program in 2016 - a format that's attractive for folks that have been programming for 50+ years - a format that's easy to parse even in Python 2.6 - a format that's version control friendly - a format that's text editor friendly (syntax highlighting, etc) For me, the two leading contenders out of the current discussion have been: - the poyo subset of YAML 1.1 - TOML 0.4.0, as implemented by pytoml The "subset of PyYAML" approach turns this into a documentation exercise (which subset?), and also runs into the problem that poyo doesn't handle serialisation yet, only *reading* YAML files. For TOML, the main questions being asked are around how widely supported it is, and it's actually in a pretty good state on that front. 0.4.0 (rather than TOML in general) is stable by definition, and there are quite a few implementations of that across different languages: https://github.com/toml-lang/toml/blob/master/versions/en/toml-v0.4.0.md#imp... The other big thing someone might want is a schema validator, and there I think it may be possible to just use jsonschema and validate the result of parsing the file, rather than validating the serialised form directly. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia