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Comment by kissgyorgy | Hacker News Reader

    The packageformat is entirely static. A series of plain-text files with fields separated by lines and spaces. Easily parseable via any programming language or with basic UNIX utilities.

And you have to write parsers for it which is PITA even if it's very simple.

Please just stick to well-known formats (even if you don't like them) and make your fellow developers life easier! For example, everyone hates YAML for one reason or another, but if you use it, you are using a format everyone is familiar with it. We know it's terrible quirks, but still well known and every language has parsers for it.

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1. There is not a single YAML format. Different parsers support varying formats and specs.

2. YAML is a terrible format for everyone. Even if you don't hate it, you can still fall prey to its poor design and not even know about it until it blows up later. A package manager is especially not somewhere you want such latent bugs.

3. Not everybody knows its terrible quirks. I'd used YAML for years, and was still surprised when I read strictyaml.org's (limited) list of documented bugs in YAML.

4. YAML isn't even the first or most-popular well-known format. So, if you're going to advocate for a well-known format that everybody can use, it makes little sense to advocate for YAML.

Yes YAML is a terrible choice, but his point is still correct. Use a standard format, not some custom nonsense you made up that can't even handle strings with spaces in them.

I recommend JSON5 or maybe TOML if your data is very flat.

> Yes YAML is a terrible choice, but his point is still correct. Use a standard format ...

As I said in point 4 above: So, if you're going to advocate for a well-known format that everybody can use, it makes little sense to advocate for YAML.

FYI: package format isn't simple/static anymore:

1. https://github.com/kisslinux/kiss/commit/d296b90b75d02ee81ec...

2. https://github.com/kisslinux/repo/pull/286

Are we witnessing the birth of a new JSON/TOML/YAML equivalent that also started as a "all of these formats are too complex, let's just do something simple" and with time added complexity? I hope they at least have a strict grammar.

My understanding is that kiss only has one non-executable file encoding:

  space-delimited entries of plain text, one entry per line

I cannot think of any more familiar format, let along the other benefits (portability, long-lasting, introspectable) which are of varying degrees of better and worse than other encodings.

In addition, up until [1], not only was the syntax simple, but so were the semantics.

[1]: https://github.com/kisslinux/kiss/commit/d296b90b75d02ee81ec...

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