Developers of Sympa

[Marc Chantreux <address@concealed>]

Hi Soji,

Any advice about the way to write my parser ? 

On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 09:22:44PM +0900, IKEDA Soji wrote:
> I become depressed thinking that we must maintain current parser
> of Conf and List modules in the future.  

don't: the format is *very* simple to parse (the current parser doesn't
reflect this simplicity though). 

> I remember past discussion about format of config files. 
> I prefer to some other general format such as YAML, JSON, ...  

this would remove some lines of code from sympa but we will lose
something important: unix friendlyness. 

the current format make it very easy to loop on lines to extract
informations from C, seq, awk … and this make sympa very friendly for
sysops! 

consider:

    awk ' 
        /^editor/,/^$/ {
            if ($1 ~ /email/) {print $2}
        }
    ' config 

this will work without extra tool.

so if removing the old format is planned, providing a tool to query the
config file will be mandatory.

> They are disadvantageous when users want to edit manually, 

i really think config files would be easier to edit if stored in the
YAML format. this is an example 

    editors: 
        address@concealed:
          reception: mail
          visibility: noconceal
          gecos: Sylvie 
        address@concealed:
          reception: mail
          visibility: noconceal
    shared_doc: { d_edit: owner, d_read: private }
    clean_delay_queuemod: 15 

or even 

    editors: 
        address@concealed: {reception: mail, visibility: noconceal, 
gecos: Sylvie }
        address@concealed: { reception: mail visibility: noconceal }
    shared_doc: { d_edit: owner, d_read: private }
    clean_delay_queuemod: 15

is currently (with the sympa format) written as:

    shared_doc
    d_edit owner
    d_read private

    clean_delay_queuemod 15

    editor
    reception mail
    email address@concealed
    visibility noconceal
    gecos Sylvie 

    editor
    reception mail
    email address@concealed
    visibility noconceal
    gecos Frédéric 

so i really think we need to support both.  

regards 


-- 
Marc Chantreux
Université de Strasbourg, Direction Informatique
14 Rue René Descartes,
67084  STRASBOURG CEDEX
☎: 03.68.85.57.40
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