[Dancer-users] YAML, why?

[Maurice Mengel]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YAML says that YAML should handle UTF-8
or UTF-16, so maybe there is indeed a bug involved.

If so, where would it be? In Dancer::YAML or further down the stack?

On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 1:35 PM, Robert Olson <bob at rdolson.org> wrote:
> On Sep 22, 2010, at 11:42 AM, P Kishor wrote:
>
>> Hi Alexis,
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 8:54 AM, Alexis Sukrieh <sukria at sukria.net> wrote:
>>> Le 22/09/2010 14:24, P Kishor a écrit :
>>>>>
>>>>> Configuration files, on the other hand, are not meant to be written with
>>>>> a
>>>>> programming language.
>>>>
>>>> who says so? I use PDL (Perl Data Language), a highly complex and
>>>> powerful software, probably the most complex I have ever used, and all
>>>> its configuration required to build it are done using a extremely
>>>> readable perl data structure.
>>>
>>> Well, Dancer has been written with one main idea in mind: everything should
>>> be simple and intuitive.
>>>
>>> If there is one reason why people like Dancer, it's because of that: it's
>>> simple, intuitive and elegant.
>>>
>>> YAML configuration files contribute to that, it's very handy to just drop a
>>> list of key/value pairs in one config.yml file and just start working.
>>>
>>> Of course you can find many examples of applications whose configuration
>>> files are written with a programming language, but I dislike that.
>>>
>>> Because if you let the user write his configuration files with a script,
>>> sooner or later someone will start putting code inside, and that's a pandora
>>> box.
>>>
>>>>> YAML is a very good and well-kown format for
>>>>> human-readable configuration files.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Again, who says so? citations?
>>>
>>> My experience tells me that. Again, if you want to write pure perl Dancer
>>> settings, you can do it. YAML files are there for people who want to keep
>>> their settings outside of their code.
>>>
>>>
>>>> Besides, who wants human-readable? I want programmer-readable. No
>>>> human reads the config files on a daily basis, but my computer does
>>>> all the time. I just gave you an example above where a simple
>>>> indentation can cause misunderstanding both to the human and the
>>>> computer.
>>>
>>> I precisely want human-readable here. Again, Dancer is meant to be as easy
>>> to handle as possible. It's a key feature. You won't make me change my mind
>>> on this ;)
>>>
>>
>>
>> My intent was not to change your mind, but just to have a
>> conversation. I totally respect your decision to implement config-ing
>> with YAML, but I appreciate the fact that I can also provide the same
>> info as a Perl data structure via settings.
>>
>> YAML itself doesn't bother me -- it is its focus on indentation and
>> white space as being meaningful that bothers me. As I gave my example,
>> the config code fragment for enabling utf-8 as shown on Dancer website
>> croaks with an error. So, I can't even take the "canonical" example
>> and cut and paste it in my code and expect it to work. That, to me,
>> does not make a simple framework. That makes an needlessly fragile
>> framework that is prone to errors based on which way the wind is
>> blowing.
>>
>> Anyway, enough said -- config is such a small part of my overall
>> application that I will either learn how to implement it in YAML
>> (thankfully, only very little learning required) or just use Perl
>
> I don't recall - does Dancer use Config::Any inside? Would that address this issue?
>
>
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