Suitable (file) format for "package manifest"

[Urs Liska]

Hi all,

I'm thinking about improving openLilyLib and making it more accessible
to arbitrary package handling approaches by requiring a manifest file to
be included in a package.

So far there is *some* solution with a \declarePackage \with { }
LilyPond command (as you can see in
https://github.com/openlilylib/snippets/blob/master/ly/scholarly/__init__.ily)
but actually I'd rather have a solution with a dedicated file for that.

So I'm looking for a suitable config file format that is equally simple
to read from LIlyPond and from other languages (e.g. Python or Node.js).
The obvious choice seems to be JSON with a package.json, but Guile
doesn't have proper JSON support yet (only with a module that is not
included by default).

Of course I could invent a format with sections/labels and a key-value
syntax which can easily be parsed with arbitrary languages, or I could
use a "bare" Scheme expression in such a file and require other
languages to parse that. But I'd prefer using something more mainstream
with existing solutions and support in different languages (like e.g.
JSON or YAML).

Any suggestions what would be a promising approach?

TIA
Urs


-- 
address@hidden
https://openlilylib.org
http://lilypondblog.org