Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: [kvm-devel] [PATCH] Add support for a configuration file

[Anthony Liguori]

Avi Kivity wrote:
> Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> > That's very nearly YAML format[1], which is attractive because parsers
> > are available in every major programming language, and it is still
> > pretty human friendly.
> >
> > So my preference would be to go with the last option and make sure
> > it really is YAML compliant so people can use standard tools for 
> > generating and parsing the format.
> >   
>
> Using a standard format has the added benefit that things like quoting 
> are taken care of.
>
> Filenames with leading and trailing spaces, anyone?  Embedded control 
> characters?

YAML is a bad choice though.  It's purpose is to model data structures 
of embedded languages (similar to JSON).  The syntax would get out of 
hand quickly because what we've been talking about so far would be 
modeled as an association whereas semantically, we want it to be a 
sequence.  To make it a sequence, we would have to prefix every line 
with '-'.

I'm not against following some sort of standard (or even best 
practice).  I just don't like YAML.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori