Re: [gentoo-dev] Proposal: profiles/arches.desc - improve repoman flexibility (with other benefits)

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Sun, 26 Mar 2017 13:04:18 -0700
Brian Dolbec <dolsen@g.o> wrote:
> While this is a simple format.  This is not a standard data input file
> format for language tools to map it into native language variables and
> types.
>
> I would much prefer for any new files to be created in a format that
> most languages have data input modules for and are easily read/edited
> by humans.  While this can be read and split easily in python code.
> It is not future proof for additional data being added and/or removed.
>
>  For the repoman stage3 rewrites. I am moving all configurable data
>  from the code into yaml based files in /metadata/repoman.  These
> files will be easily edited by all developers for updates to banned
> eclasses and various other values not needing code changes.
>
> So with a general file name of arches.desc  Is there any other data
> that we want to include in that file?  Possibly migrated from other
> file(s).  In that case a dictionary format yaml file might be best.
> My example below has additional info over what was proposed.
> It is an example only to show the possible benefit of such a file
> type.

It's bad enough that we have to parse XML inside the package mangler for
optional data. Adding YAML (with all its format bugs: YAML files
created with libyaml can't be read by syck, and vice-versa) for files
that the package mangler has to read is even worse.

Plain text *is* a standard format.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh