Re: Status bibref gatherer (Was: Tasks pages (close to) fixed; Bibref does not seem to be updated automatically)

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Le Fri, Mar 09, 2012 at 09:06:14AM +0900, Charles Plessy a écrit :
> 
> For adding a rank to the references, this may be a good idea, but how do you
> propose to implement this in YAML ?  Perhaps it would be simpler to keep
> a single reference broken in YAML fields as it is now, and dump the rest in
> BiBTeX format in a separate field ?

Hi again,

I think that we need to discuss the general syntax of the file.

Initially, I thought it as limited to "name: value" fields like in Debian control
data files.  Then after adding many Reference-* fields, I found that syntax
boring and introduced a trick, that hashes are permitted but that they are
reduced to simple fields by concatenating the hash name to the field name.

Foo:
 Bar: baz

is therfore the same as:

Foo-Bar: baz

I have documented this in the Debian wiki long time ago.

  http://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamMetadata

We need to keep in mind that we will already meet a strong resistance to YAML
(at least in terms of loudness; we know that sometimes it actually represents
close to nothing), and therefore be carful to not go too far in directions
that deviate from the name:value paradigm.

This said, for me it is essential to use YAML.  You can see that each time
some control data files change their contents, like in the Debian archive,
things break because they are parsed ad-hoc and each field needs to be
described on how it is parsed.  YAML totally solves this for the field
syntax.  And (apart from libyaml-per) it has good parsers in many languages.

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles