[Discuss] Application config files

[richard.pieri at gmail.com (Rich Pieri)]

On Fri, 12 Jul 2019 16:16:15 -0500
Derek Martin <invalid at pizzashack.org> wrote:

> I largely disagree.  If it's currently in INI format the equivalent
> JSON should generally be perfectly human-readable, e.g.:

Computer-generated JSON can be human-readable. Doesn't mean it will be.
Often enough it is not. Very not. For example, my Calibre metadata
sources cache is 174KB dumped into 24 lines of text one of which is the
open brace and another is the close brace. That's 22 lines of
unreadable, computer-generated JSON. Admittedly that cache isn't
easily stored in simple key/value pairs because it's not simple
key/value data like your example. Use JSON if you need to store complex
data. Otherwise I suggest avoiding it.

Avoid YAML. It's great for Ansible because Ansible has test modes so
you can verify that the code acutally does what it's supposed to do
before it wrecks things. Unless you're exposing your configuration
parser for external testing then YAML should be taken off the table.

INI and TOML are basic key/value stores. They are easily read and
modified by humans and there are parsers available in pretty much any
language you care to use (they're also not difficult to write if you
have an exception). If you need human readability (and optionally human
writability) then either INI or TOML are good choices to consider.

-- 
Rich Pieri