Le Thu, Jan 03, 2013 at 10:29:13AM +0800, Paul Wise a écrit : > > Is there any reason you didn't choose a deb822 based format?
The "deb822" format, also known as "control data" or "paragraph" format, is particularly useful for keeping in a single file a serie of groups of fields, where the order of the groups is significant. This is the case for the source package control file (debian/control), where the first paragraph is a header, or for the machine-readable Debian copyright file, where the patterns of the Files paragraphs take precedence over each other. Apart from this, I think that it has no advantage over YAML. The YAML format is precisely specified, but it is not the case of the control data format, because the nature of each field (simple, folded, multiline) has to be defined in advance. In contrast, with YAML, the nature of the field (scalar, sequence, mapping), is embedded in the syntax. In the case of the proposed debian/upstream file, I find this feature very important as I would like it to be easy to extend with new fields. The YAML format is also very convenient as it matches closely data structures (scalar, array, hash) found in common interpreted languages. We have used YAML as the syntax of debian/upstream for a couple of years and have not experienced significant inconvenience. Other files formatted in YAML are also already provided by the Debian infrastructure. There are good parsers for a large number of languages. Lastly, I think that using YAML for debian/upstream is more inviting for third parties to download and use the data, because the control data format is not much used outside Debian. Altogether, I do not see benefits for using the control data format in debian/upstream. I think that YAML is more straightforward and natural for the debian/upstream file. Are there major shortcomings that we would have overlooked ? Have a nice week-end, -- Charles Plessy Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-qa-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130105071654.ga22...@falafel.plessy.net