Developers of Sympa

[IKEDA Soji <address@concealed>]

Hi,

On Wed, 19 Mar 2014 14:01:51 +0100
Marc Chantreux <address@concealed> wrote:

> Hi Soji,
> 
> Any advice about the way to write my parser ? 

Though I worry I misunderstand that you brought, since ListDef
format is less structured, I suppose:
- It doesn't require high order context-free grammer provided by
  such as Pegex.
- It merely need not sequencial tokenization by such as m//gc.

They look slightly heavy axes to slice cheese for me.

A point of improvement to current code I can indicate is to use
paragraph mode:

    local $/ = '';
    while ($paragraph = <$config_fh>) {
        # parse paragraph
    }

> 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.

I feel same.  I love line-oriented plain text formats, too.  OTOH,
I feel dissatisfied with its less expressiveness.  It cannot
represent list, set, map and so on.

> 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.  

Current format cannot represent multi-level structure such as nested
lists and/or maps, for additional example, I wish to write:

    shared_doc:
      enabled: yes
      privileges:
        d_edit: owner
        d_read: private

So I guess both formats cannot stand in row: we may keep current
format or may through it away.


Regards,

--- Soji


> regards 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Marc Chantreux
> Université de Strasbourg, Direction Informatique
> 14 Rue René Descartes,
> 67084  STRASBOURG CEDEX
> ☎: 03.68.85.57.40
> http://unistra.fr
> "Don't believe everything you read on the Internet"
>     -- Abraham Lincoln


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