this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023
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A box of DevOps (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 year ago by tja to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh god, parsing complexity. I actually tried writing a YAML parser in my free time before and boy was that not worth the headache. So many little things that complicate parsing and are ignored by majority of users!

I really like python, but I can agree that it's no-delimiters style can be... Confusing at times. I definitely had to hunt down bugs that were introduced by wrong indentation. That and the way it handles global/local variables, mostly.

I do appreciate not having to enclose every key in "", and being able to copy values - but if we want that kind of logic making our configs, why not just switch to writing configurations in Lua? It certainly has less footguns than YAML and it has the niceties like "I can just write {key = "value"} instead of {"key": "value"}".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Honestly that probably goes for any interpreted programming language that supports imports.

Many Javascript frameworks just put their configuration into -.config.js files in the project root. Which is a pretty elegant solution that does not require custom parsing. Just import the config and go nuts.

Compiled (and by extension bundled) software obviously requires a different approach, but at that point you should probably consider storing your config in some kind of database.

Maybe there just isn't a right answer to the config conundrum if all the general solutions are janky in some way.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Well, there's a few things I personally think are a must for a config format:

  1. It must be human readable and editable, in some way. - in many cases, you may want to go and change something in the config while the application proper isn't running. That rules out stuff like pickle or binary formats. Although I suppose sqlite and it's ilk still fulfill it, in a roundabout way.
  2. It should be unambiguous, with one way to do something right. - this one's a doozie. JSON fulfills it since it's unambiguous about it's types, but many interpreted language configs will have options. And then YAML will have "no" turn into "false".
  3. It should probably have comments. - handily failed by standard JSON implementations. Although to be fair a lot of parsers I've used understand comments. Or you can make a comment stripper real easily.
  4. It should have obvious structure. - I've dealt with CSV configs before, I do not want to ever again.