On Thu, May 1, 2014 at 12:28 AM, Rob Miller <[email protected]> wrote:
> Good question. Here are my thoughts on all of the options you've listed: > > JSON: The first versions of Heka used JSON as the config language. JSON is > reasonably human-readable, but I find it pretty annoying to have to write > by hand. No single issue is a deal-breaker, it's more of a "death by a > thousand papercuts" experience. It's fiddly about commas (i.e. trailing > commas not allowed). You have to type a lot of superfluous characters. > Escaping strings for regular expressions is painful. > 100% agree > > INI: INI format doesn't support nested sections. > YAML: YAML would probably be my next choice after TOML, but I still find > it a bit more fiddly. It's a much more complicated format. Nesting depends > on matching indentation. Like JSON, it was designed as a data serialization > format, not really configuration. > TOML: TOML came out just at the time we were realizing that JSON was going > to be painful to work with, and we though it was hitting on the right idea > for a config format: INI plus nesting. Simple to write, simple to read. > There was a Go implementation from the beginning. We tried it out, it fit > in easily, it's worked w/ little trouble, so we've been happy with it. > > The only thing we don't like about TOML is that it also makes escaping > regular expression strings painful. We opened a ticket on this against the > TOML spec over a year ago (https://github.com/mojombo/toml/issues/188). > We've routed around that by implementing our own fork that supports the > "raw strings" extension (https://github.com/bbangert/toml). A bit messy, > perhaps, but all in all it's working so we're not really inclined to invest > our resources in switching to another format. > I don't have read the YAML spec but dealing with YAML is quite easy but sometimes it's not superintuitive. Like many others I use yaml very extensively in Ansible --not trivial configuration-- and it's quite handy and doens't provide limitations of what can be achieved in that context. Having to hack the spec to get what you need working is messy indeed and makes me prefer YAML but makes sense in this case. > > Hope this helps, > Thanks for the answer! > > -r > > > > On Wed 30 Apr 2014 02:03:35 AM PDT, Victor Castell wrote: > >> Maybe it's a dumb question or it has already been answered but why use >> TOML as the configuration format? >> >> I have nothing against TOML as a concept but it's spec it's still >> changing a lot (as it says), it's not as "standard"/widespread/known >> as JSON/YAML/INI that serves equal for this purpose, or I'm wrong? >> > > _______________________________________________ > Heka mailing list > [email protected] > https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/heka > -- V
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