06. Data structures, not YAML Proposal:
The META spec should be defined in terms of (Perl) data structures, and not in terms of YAML. (Slaven Rezic) Comments: * This does not mean that I want to replace YAML by a Perl data dump (or maybe yes, but see below). It is just about the specification document: it should not talk about "META.yml", but the META spec, and should not use the YAML data type names (mapping, sequence), but Perl data type names (hash, array). * The actual serialization proposals could go into an appendix of the spec, or even in a new document. So whether it will be JSON, or YAML::Tiny, or YAML 1.1 could be decided later. * In my opinion I would vote for *two* serialization formats: normal YAML as it is done currently (or even YAML 1.1), which would be used for statistical analysis (here we can force people to install the latest and greatest YAML parser), and a Perl data dump which is used by CPAN.pm etc. for configure_requires or similar stuff (here the user has probably a very bare perl installation, the minimum we can expect is the ability to parse Perl). Something similar is done with distroprefs handling in CPAN.pm: if .yml is available, fine, otherwise it's possible to fallback to .dd, a perl data dump file. * I am still fine that the examples in the spec are still expressed in YAML, because I think that YAML is a quite nice human-readable format.
