Viktor Dukhovni:
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2014 at 03:02:08PM -0400, Wietse Venema wrote:
>
> > > Postfix has a simple string interface for its key-value store. I
> > > have an aversion against changing that into some binary protocol
> > > with sub-record structure. Similar to my aversion against systemd
> > > logging, among other things.
> >
> > JSON can be represented as printable ASCII, and circumvent some of
> > my aversion against binary protocols. But wait, there is more.
>
> Being somewhat old-fashioned, my initial mental model of multi-value
> lists was TCL lists, somewhat simpler than JSON. But that's just
> a user-interface question.
Indeed. The issues that I raised are that 1) support for multiple
values or multiple results will require some kind of encoding, and
2) this encoding must be robust enough that regexp/pcre tables can
safely substitute text into them without changing the over-all
syntactical structure.
A third issue is that other programs must be able to process Postfix
tables and implement Postfix policy servers with readily-available
parsers. The current free-text format is so brain-dead simple that
no custom parser code is needed. As for structured formats, JSON is a
standard feature of many languages, TCL is not.
Wietse
