* Michael G Schwern <schw...@pobox.com> [2009-05-17T20:59:08] > Ricardo SIGNES wrote: > > Those of you who were at Birmingham heard me go on and on about my burning > > desire to replace the use of YAML in CPAN dist metadata with JSON. I'd be > > happy to review the reasons, but for now I'll take it for granted that we > > all know them and agree. That certainly seemed to be the case amongst the > > crowd at QA09. > > I remain the loyal opposition. Not as fiercely as with TAP, since META.json > is intended more for machines than TAP is and so the benefits do not so > clearly outweigh the complexity of parsing YAML.
Right now, there is more or less an unspoken mandate that the YAML in META.yml must be parseable by YAML::Tiny, meaning it has *no* feature benefits over JSON. It's just a little easier for humans to read. Seriously, though, just a little, itty-bitty bit. q.v., http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/RJBS/Dist-Zilla-1.091370/META.json There is no documented, proven YAML implementation in Perl. I think that YAML::XS seems to work pretty well, but requires XS. The port of PyYAML still hasn't landed -- which is what you said we'd have any day now when you were arguing for YAML in TAP -- in Oslo in early 2008. The YAML parser and emitter would need to be in core to support CPAN build and install tools. Why are you still pushing, even a little, for anyone to *keep* making META.yml in the future? Are there arguments that I'm not seeing or appreciating? > > Today I updated my proof of concept (and/or civil disobedience dist) > > JSON-Meta-CPAN, which makes all the three common build tools (Module::Build, > > Module::Install, and ExtUtils::MakeMaker) optionally produce JSON instead of > > YAML. With the new version, dists will not produce a META.yml, but will > > *instead* produce a META.json. I have also updated my own build system, > > Dist::Zilla, to do the same when asked. > > I'll take a patch to MakeMaker to do that on demand. Once CPAN, CPANPLUS, and PAUSE support JSON, I hope you will consider a patch to do it by default. > I would prefer to still able to produce META.yml but I understand not wanting > to saddle parsers with having to deal with two protocols. I suppose there's > nothing stopping me from spitting out both. I don't care if both are produced, as long as the rule is "tools should prefer JSON if both are present and your tool can parse JSON." Well, I do care, but not very much. -- rjbs
