Developers of Sympa

[Marc Chantreux <address@concealed>]

hello, 

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 05:58:19PM +0100, David Verdin wrote:
> >I become depressed thinking that we must maintain current parser
> >of Conf and List modules in the future.
> I must agree with Soji.   

i wasn't disagreed.

> param1
>     subparam1
>         sub-subparam1 value   

i know it's weird but 

param1/subparam1/sub-subparam:1 value    
param1/subparam1/sub-subparam:2 value 

is a valid solution. simple to edit and parse even un shell …

on the other hand: as sympa is a web-app, shouldn't we prefer JSON?

what about s-exprs? easy to parse, read and edit (and we should have a
line based serializer):  

(param1
    (subparam11
        (sub-subparam1 value))) 

we can also store them in a sqlite, a key/value store, an XML file, let an 
external django-rest webapp.

And all of those have pro and cons (even xml which can be validated with
a schema).

so i propose to not chooose for the administrators. Instead: 

* provide documented specs
* provide YAML  formated examples as spec tests
* let administrators the ability to choose/maintain their modules that
  serialize/deserialize datastructures that could complies the spec and
  use them at their own risks.

so the community would be free ot discuss/implement new things.

regards,
-- 
Marc Chantreux
Université de Strasbourg, Direction Informatique
14 Rue René Descartes,
67084  STRASBOURG CEDEX
☎: 03.68.85.57.40
http://unistra.fr
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