Sorry for resurrecting an old thread, but have you considered using JSON5 ( https://github.com/aseemk/json5)? Author's rationale:
> JSON isn't the friendliest to *write*. Keys need to be quoted, objects > and arrays can't have trailing commas, and comments aren't allowed — even > though none of these are the case with regular JavaScript today. > > That was fine when JSON's goal was to be a great data format, but JSON's > usage has expanded beyond*machines*. JSON is now used for writing > configs<http://plovr.com/docs.html> > , manifests <http://npmjs.org/doc/json.html>, even > tests<http://code.google.com/p/fuzztester/wiki/JSONFileFormat> — > all by *humans*. > > There are other formats that are human-friendlier, like YAML, but changing > from JSON to a completely different format is undesirable in many cases. > JSON5’s aim is to remain close to JSON and JavaScript. > All this while: > JSON5 remains a *strict subset of JavaScript*, adds *no new data types*, > and *works with all existing JSON content*. > On Saturday, January 5, 2013 10:22:06 PM UTC+4, Alex Kocharin wrote: > > Hello, everybody. > > > TL;DR: I think that JSON is not a suitable config file format, and I want > npm to be able to read configs stored in some other way by default. It > might be just javascript, or yaml, I don't really care as long as it better > for configuration files than json. > > > So, there is a dependency list in package.json, and it would be a good > practice to have a comment for every line describing why we require that > package, why we require that version of that package, what known problems > we have and so on. > > But there's a small issue. JSON format doesn't allow comments in any way. > > Right now there are a couple of different ways around it of course: > > 1. Non-standard JSON entries like "@comment": "blablabla". Unfortunately, > javascript editors doesn't highlight it as a comment, and it's just plain > ugly. Also this violates strict javascript mode, so God knows what trouble > it'll cause in the future. > 2. Keep a commented dependency list in a separate file. This violates DRY > principle, so we could update one file and forget to update another. The > same goes for /**package **/ hack I believe. > 3. Use some kind of build system. Just for damn comments in one file? > > Also, there's another wrong thing with JSON, it's too strict. You can't > omit double quotes from keys, you can't leave a trailing comma, etc. JSON > is human-readable, but it's just not damn human-writable. > > Well... I went for 3rd option for a very long time. We used package.js > file and a Makefile that compile js to json. Yes, that's three damn files > instead of one. That's an example of our package.js file. > https://gist.github.com/4462764 . But a number of supported packages > grew, and compiling this slowly became a major pain in the ass. I recently > got an issue when I updated package.js, but forgot to compile it, and > debugging this one was a quite interesting experience. So, I'm now in a > mood of forking things and making all my public packages incompatible with > mainstream npm... > > > So, there's a couple of alternatives. For example, Travis use YAML, and > there is CSON (it's coffeescript version with blackjack and hookers). > > And I think there was a couple of discussions about it. So, did anybody > come up with more or less sane idea how to deal with this? What happened to > package.json.js? > > > Happy New Year! > -- -- Job Board: http://jobs.nodejs.org/ Posting guidelines: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Mailing-List-Posting-Guidelines You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "nodejs" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs?hl=en?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "nodejs" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
