Re: [DEP 12] Why chosing YAML.

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

On Sat, 2013-01-05 at 17:09:10 +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:
> > That said, every other structured file in a Debian package (with a few
> > minor exceptions like debian/watch) is in the deb822 format.  So it's
> > basically a question of whether the additional hassle of having to deal
> > with two different formats and two different parsers in code that operates
> > on Debian packages is worth the benefits of YAML.
> 
> If you check out the Wiki for the Reference field you see that it is
> defined as a mapping or sequence of mappings.  I have no idea how to
> express this in deb822 format and I could perfectly think of similar
> data to store in debian/upstream of this kind.  So I'd regard deb822
> simply insufficient for storing what we want to store and so the
> question whether to use deb822 for debian/upstream becomes void.

I can think of several ways, one coulf be by defining that the contents
of a Reference field are key value pairs, as in:

Reference:
 author Name Surname
 url http://example.org

or variations on this, with or w/o the :, etc, with the subfield
capitalized, etc. This has the very obvious drawback that you need parse
the contents explicitly, outside the normal parser. Although, the more
natural way to represent those in deb822 format is:

Ref-Author: Name Surname
Ref-Url: http://example.org

or variations like expanding the field names to stuff like Reference-Url.

Thanks,
Guillem