On Wednesday, 25 November 2015 at 12:08:46 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On what grounds?

Well, yaml is quiiite complex.

On Wednesday, 25 November 2015 at 12:39:47 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
> On Wednesday, 25 November 2015 at 12:08:46 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> On what grounds?
>
> Well, yaml is quiiite complex.

What about JSON with comments? You could always strip them. But I admit that JSON becomes a bit messy after a while. It's not ideal. As I said, nothing against SDL as long as we can have a conversion tool.

On Wednesday, 25 November 2015 at 12:43:01 UTC, Chris wrote:
> What about JSON with comments? You could always strip them. But I admit that JSON becomes a bit messy after a while. It's not ideal. As I said, nothing against SDL as long as we can have a conversion tool.

There's no json5 D parser?

On Wednesday, 25 November 2015 at 11:54:00 UTC, Suliman wrote:
>>I find the SDLang format much cleaner to use than JSON
> But it's dead format! Nobody do not use it. JSON easy to read, there is a lot of it's checkers and formating tools.
>
> Yes, it's not perfect, but now it's _standard_. Personally I'd prefer yaml, because it's much easier to read for humans.
>
> But what we will do with SDL? Who know how to parse, validate it with D, and with another language? Even ini is better, because everybody know it.

it can be dead but AFAIK it is complete. if we were to face any problems with it, we would fork it and fix it.

SDL has been chosen in a very simple manner - comparing samples of same project description in different formats and informally voting which one is cleaner and more straightforward to read. Probably people who voted at that point were not representative selection but it hardly matters as conservative crowd can awlays stick with old json. As project description files are only parsed internally by dub, it is irrelevant how widespread and well-supported format is as long as it is easy to read and does the job.

On Wednesday, 25 November 2015 at 10:17:02 UTC, Suliman wrote:
> I think that using SDL format was big mistake. Not only I do not want to spend time in learning yet another dead config format that now use only one project -- DUB. In time when DUB used json it was not perfect, but at last it was standard and everybody can read it.
>
> Now when I come to code.dlang.org I can't simply do copy-past of dependence. I need go to docs page, and read how to include it.
>
> Also I do not see any projects that are migrate to SDL. Everybody continue to use JSON. So please, return JSON back as default, or very soon we will see that nobody do not submit packages to code.dlang.org and nobody do not use DUB for their own projects.
>
> Please vote about SDL config format http://www.easypolls.net/poll.html?p=565587f4e4b0b3955a59fb67
>
> If SDL will stay by default I will prefer to move to any other build system or will downgrade to old version of DUB.

Voted no. About SDL, i think that the comment summarizes everthing: not popular, bad name. One last detail:

http://sdl.ikayzo.org/

It looks like it's even not worth fixing it for the author(s). (But of course I apologize in case of the problem would be related to the guy(s) being sick or worth).

Also neither VisualD nor MonoD support SDL. My IDE will never, but that's less a problem since it's not published anymore.

And by the way what the problem the JSON format had that gets solved by SDL ?

On Wednesday, 25 November 2015 at 12:08:46 UTC, Chris wrote:
> Wouldn't it make more sense to have JSON that allows comments? Comments are something that's really missing in JSON.

My one real complaint with JSON at this point (regardless of dub's situation) is the fact that it doesn't support comments. I'd probably have more complaints if I used it more, but in general, it works well - except for the lack of comments (which can be particularly annoying in something like a configuration file, though I don't know how much that influence the decision to switch the SDL for dub).

- Jonathan M Davis

On Wednesday, 25 November 2015 at 12:39:47 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
> On Wednesday, 25 November 2015 at 12:08:46 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> On what grounds?
>
> Well, yaml is quiiite complex.

And hideous IMHO. The fact that it considers whitespace significant means that I will almost certainly never been in favor of using it for anything. I've been stuck using it before, and I'd much prefer to just use JSON.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Wednesday, 25 November 2015 at 10:17:02 UTC, Suliman wrote:
> I think that using SDL format was big mistake. Not only I do not want to spend time in learning yet another dead config format that now use only one project -- DUB. In time when DUB used json it was not perfect, but at last it was standard and everybody can read it.
>
> Now when I come to code.dlang.org I can't simply do copy-past of dependence. I need go to docs page, and read how to include it.
>
> Also I do not see any projects that are migrate to SDL. Everybody continue to use JSON. So please, return JSON back as default, or very soon we will see that nobody do not submit packages to code.dlang.org and nobody do not use DUB for their own projects.
>
> Please vote about SDL config format http://www.easypolls.net/poll.html?p=565587f4e4b0b3955a59fb67
>
> If SDL will stay by default I will prefer to move to any other build system or will downgrade to old version of DUB.

I don't really like SDL from the little I've messed around with it (it's too much like the INI format for my taste), but we're talking about simple build configuration files here. It's not like this is an actual build script like you get with cmake or make. It's pretty much just a list of key-value pairs used to tell the build tool what to do. The files are very short, and you don't have to deal with them much. So, ultimately, while I don't really like SDL, I'm not sure that it's worth caring much about either.

That being said, the JSON format isn't going anywhere, so you can just use that if you prefer. In most cases, you shouldn't need to read any dub config files, unless you're working on the project that the config file is for, and in many (most?) of those cases, it'll probably be your own project. So, you can just use the format that prefer and ignore the other. Worst case, you can't use the default-generated dub config file when you start your project and have to copy a JSON one from elsewhere or write it from scratch, but if doesn't already, I'm sure that dub init could be changed to take a flag indicating the config format to use if enough folks prefer JSON.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Wednesday, 25 November 2015 at 15:25:32 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:

> That being said, the JSON format isn't going anywhere, so you can just use that if you prefer. In most cases, you shouldn't need to read any dub config files, unless you're working on the project that the config file is for, and in many (most?) of those cases, it'll probably be your own project. So, you can just use the format that prefer and ignore the other. Worst case, you can't use the default-generated dub config file when you start your project and have to copy a JSON one from elsewhere or write it from scratch, but if doesn't already, I'm sure that dub init could be changed to take a flag indicating the config format to use if enough folks prefer JSON.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

Is it possible to default dub to json w/o using a flag in init?  I'd rather dub init default to json for myself and anyone who prefers otherwise can stay with SDL.