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Comment by wyuenho | Hacker News Reader

INI has no spec, and there are many variations all slightly incompatible with each other, kinda like Markdown. YAML is really the only sane configuration language that lets you denote nested structures while keeping them look nested.

Basically, all of the problem identified in the article can be dealt with 1 rule - always quote your strings. I agree with the author we should have reduced, safe and minimalist subset of yaml, which is basically YAML 1.2, released in 2009.

P.S. Please just stop using PyYAML.

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There's HOCON which is pretty good if you can run on a JVM. It's a superset of JSON designed for readability and human-friendliness when writing config files. It doesn't change the type system and doesn't have yamls weird edge cases, but is still a lot easier to write than JSON. There's also a relatively tight spec.

https://github.com/lightbend/config/blob/main/HOCON.md

We use an extended version of it for our app and the resulting config is pretty clean. You can see an example here:

https://hydraulic.software/blog/8-packaging-electron-apps.ht...

The only downside is that the reference implementation is hardly maintained anymore.

I second that. And if people need to deal with YAML in Python, they should be using ruamel.yaml, which is a far superior library on just about every level: https://pypi.org/project/ruamel.yaml/

Or if you want to go really minimalist there's also https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml

Except that the author of ruamel.yaml:

refuses to use git [0]

refuses to take community submissions (except through Stack Overflow? Seems like a misuse of SO) [1]

and refuses to implement .dumps() [2].

He is difficult to work with, and any time I need to debug code that intimately deals with ruamel.yaml types, I wince.

[0] https://github.com/pycontribs/ruyaml/issues/1

[1] https://yaml.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing.html

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/a/63179923/15170511

Why would I care that the maintainer prefers Mercurial? The document you linked to doesn't say anything about them not taking community submissions: I think you need to scroll down further in the page. And it certainly doesn't say that you have to use SO to submit changes.

> Please just stop using PyYAML.

Why?

From the article:

  Although yaml 1.2 is more than 10 years old by now, you would be mistaken to think that it is widely supported: the latest version libyaml at the time of writing (which is used among others by PyYAML) implements yaml 1.1 and parses 22:22 as 1342.

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