On 7 May 2016 at 04:14, Donald Stufft <don...@stufft.io> wrote: > While I personally prefer YAML to any of the options on a purely syntax based > level, when you weigh in all the other considerations for this I think that it > makes sense to go with TOML for it. > > The only other option I think that could work is what Chris (I think?) > suggested and just use a Python literal evaluated using ``ast.literal_eval()`` > this is safe to do but it would make it harder for other languages to parse > our > files. It's similar to the approach taken by Lua Rocks for how their packaging > system works (although their uses variables instead of one big dictionary > which > I think looks nicer) but Lua is much better suited for trying to execute > safely > outside of ``ast.literal_eval()`` too. > > All in all, I think TOML is the right answer (and that's why my partially > written PEP used TOML).
FWIW (and because obsessing about config formats is a long-running hobby of mine :-)) my view is: - JSON sucks as a human-editable format, because it's too strict over things like commas and has no comments. It's supported by the stdlib, though, which is nice. - YAML ought to be wonderful, but it ended up over-engineered (yes, we can ignore the bits we don't care about). Also, pyYAML is a bit of an annoying dependency (big, reportedly slow unless you use the C version) - not something I'd want pip to have to vendor. - INI (ConfigParser) format is too simple for many use cases. It has stdlib support, though. - Python literals are good, but they define values, they aren't a file format. We'd need to write a parser for "the rest" - TOML seems pretty good, but is immature (I remember when YAML seemed like TOML does now...) Also, it's unfamiliar to people (I wasn't aware of the use in Rust) - Just for a laugh, can I mention XML? :-) Overall, *any* choice feels like I'm choosing the "best of a bad job" :-( With all that said, I'm inclined to agree that TOML looks good. Paul _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
