LGV_MeetingServer VS strictyaml

I find “self-documentation” often doesn’t actually work. It’s great in theory, but often falls down, in practice.

I often need to preface my config stuff with fairly substantial comment blocks that discuss the reasoning behind the configuration.

Here’s an example: https://github.com/LittleGreenViper/LGV_MeetingServer/blob/m...

I generally have a “What Problem Does This Solve?” section in my READMEs.

https://github.com/LittleGreenViper/LGV_TZ_Lookup#what-probl...

https://github.com/LittleGreenViper/LGV_MeetingServer#what-p...

https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Spinner#what-probl...

https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_BlueThoth#what-pro...

https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_PersistentPrefs#wh...

etc.

NestedText already is the way I use YAML; everything is intepreted as a string. I have some trust in my YAML parser to not mangle most strings. I could use NestedText, but users would be unfamiliar with it, and IIRC the only parsers are in Python. But then I could use StrictYaml too https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml

you can stick to a subset of YAML syntax (e.g. strictYAML)

YAML stands for "YAML Ain’t Markup Language" - this is known as a recursive acronym. YAML is often used for writing configuration files. It’s human readable, easy to understand and can be used with other programming languages. Although YAML is commonly used in many disciplines, it has received criticism on the amoutn of whitespace .yml files have, difficulty in editing, and complexity of the standard. Despite the criticism, properly using YAML ensures that you can reproduce the results of a project and makes sure that the virtual environment packages play nicely with system packages. (If you're looking for another way to share environments there are other alternatives to YAML which include StrictYAML (a type-safe YAML parser) and NestedText)

The example you linked provides this as an example of a YAML document that he wants his format to support.

That safe subset exists and is implemented in a number of languages. It is called strict-yaml: https://hitchdev.com/strictyaml/

StrictYAML\ (33 comments)

To me those are in the category of "nice to have", and the problem is that every developer has different preferences for these [1] [2]. But the main features of StrictYaml, like supporting comments and less syntactic noise, I think are pretty uncontroversial, and perhaps it's worth it to get people to switch over for those alone. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be a significant enough improvement over JSON, and I'd say those two features are more than enough

[1]: https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml/issues/37

[2]: https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml/issues/38