[Distutils] comparison of configuration languages

[Leonardo Rochael Almeida]

In all this talk about using a YAML subset, I'm surprised no one mentioned
YAMLish:

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/yamlish

It is a well defined subset of YAML and there are implementations in other
programming languages.

The problem with the 200+-lines-single-file library above is that it
depends on PyYAML itself so, vendoring it will be challenging.

Anyway, I think TOML 0.4.0 is good enough for our needs.

On Tue, 10 May 2016 10:03 Nick Coghlan, <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 10 May 2016 at 18:54, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at 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#implementations
>
> 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 at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
> _______________________________________________
> Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/attachments/20160510/2ac986df/attachment.html>