[Distutils] comparison of configuration languages

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Tue, 10 May 2016 10:24:10 -0400
Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> 
> TOML is infinitely better at nested structured that ConfigParser, given that
> TOML actually *supports* nested structures beyond a level of 1. The only way
> to get anything like:
> 
>     [package.build]
>     dependencies = ["setuptools", "wheel"]
> 
> In ConfigParser is to add post-processing to the values, which then you're no
> longer a "ConfigParser" file, you're a "ConfigParser + Whatever random one off
> code you wrote to do post processing" file.

The post-processing doesn't seem difficult enough to make any fuss
about it, IMHO.  The most important concern here should be how usable
the format is for end users, not whether implementations need 20
additional lines of code to work with it.

(also, what is wrong with providing a pypa-specific library for parsing
required configuration? are distlib / distil / pkgutil / the
distutils-competitor-du-jour still alive?)

Regards

Antoine.