Comment by devnulloverflow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by devnulloverflow | Hacker News Reader

devnulloverflow

As much as I am an old-school Unix zealot, I think it is time to move towards a well standardised binary config format with non-trivial types (i.e a schema). There still has to be a standard text format, but only for the source from which the live configs have to be built. Done right, this has several advantages:

1. Built-time validation (or at least type checking).

2. Built configs can be easy to parse but (potentially) rich enough to avoid confusing templating.

3. Separation of concerns between storing/maintaining configs and applying them. E.g. scoop text configs off a source repo, but send out binary configs over the network.

All this is a fantasy in my head. Right now the closest mainstream thing is protobufs. But they make trade-offs for non-config use cases, and thus don't really cut it in the "... rich enough to avoid confusing templating" department.

SQLite databases might fit the bill. Fairly lightweight. Can talk to them in basically any language. Instead of templates you copy the database file and issue some UPDATEs.

They don't type check though; most constraints arent enforced, and the underlying reality (slinging around mostly strings) leaks out often.

I agree this a pretty choice.

But that, and the parent's idea of binary formats in general, throws away the absolute golden property of text format configuration files: you can put those in git, and see with an accuracy of a single character what has changed. My impression was always that this was a huge reason for plain text files in the first place.

Someone mentioned protobufs, maybe with something like those one could have both?

> you can put those in git, and see with an accuracy of a single character what has changed.

You can use sqldiff[1]. Try adding it to your .gitattributes[2]. If you need TRIGGERs and VIEWs, consider dumping your database[3] instead.

[1]: https://www.sqlite.org/sqldiff.html

[2]: https://git-scm.com/docs/gitattributes

[3]: https://gist.github.com/peteristhegreat/a028bc3b588baaea09ff...

Property Lists already do tick some of those boxes.

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