Le Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 10:01:36AM -0400, Adrian Perez a écrit : > There's any plan of supporting another format - without breaking > compatibility, I mean supporting - besides the RFC one? > I think YAML would be a good one.
Hello Adrian, I thought about YAML for machine-readable license summaries and came the conclusion that it is not suitable. I think that it is also true for Debian control files for the following reasons: The “pseudo-RFC” format that Debian uses is organised in paragraphs, also called ‘stanzas’, and often the first of them has a special role. YAML on the other hand has concepts of scalars, sequences and mappings (in Perl, they would be called scalars, arrays and hashes). First of all, if we want the first paragraph of a Debian control file to have a special role, then the YAML must be organised as a sequence of mappings. Here is YAML's example: Example 2.4. Sequence of Mappings (players’ statistics) - name: Mark McGwire hr: 65 avg: 0.278 - name: Sammy Sosa hr: 63 avg: 0.288 (http://www.yaml.org/spec/1.2/spec.html#id2559116) In a Debian control file, it would reduce readability with no benefit. Second, the “pseudo-RFC” format delegates the management of folding to the Debian Policy, while in YAML it has to be part of the markup: “|” and “>” are used to denote when line breaks are significant or not: name: Mark McGwire accomplishment: > Mark set a major league home run record in 1998. stats: | 65 Home Runs 0.278 Batting Average (http://www.yaml.org/spec/1.2/spec.html#id2559996) So basically, switching Debian control files to YAML would mean addign “-”, “|” and “>” signs in precise locations, each of them being one opportunity for a parsing error. Here is a simple example based on a debian/control file for the seaview package: Source: seaview Section: non-free/science Priority: optional Maintainer: Debian-Med Packaging Team <debian-med-packag...@lists.alioth.debian.org> DM-Upload-Allowed: yes Uploaders: Charles Plessy <ple...@debian.org> Build-Depends: debhelper ( >= 7 ), libfltk1.1-dev, libjpeg62-dev, libpng12-dev, libxft-dev, libxext-dev, zlib1g-dev Standards-Version: 3.8.1 Vcs-Browser: http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/debian-med/trunk/packages/seaview/trunk/?rev=0&sc=0 Vcs-Svn: svn://svn.debian.org/svn/debian-med/trunk/packages/seaview/trunk/ Homepage: http://pbil.univ-lyon1.fr/software/seaview.html Package: seaview Architecture: any Depends: ${shlibs:Depends}, ${misc:Depends} Recommends: clustalw, muscle, phyml Description: Multiplatform interface for sequence alignment and phylogeny SeaView reads and writes various file formats (NEXUS, MSF, CLUSTAL, FASTA, PHYLIP, MASE, Newick) of DNA and protein sequences and of phylogenetic trees. Alignments can be manually edited. It drives the programs Muscle or Clustal W for multiple sequence alignment, and also allows to use any external alignment algorithm able to read and write FASTA-formatted files. . It computes phylogenetic trees by parsimony using PHYLIP's dnapars/protpars algorithm, by distance with NJ or BioNJ algorithms on a variety of evolutionary distances, or by maximum likelihood using the program PhyML 3.0. SeaView draws phylogenetic trees on screen or PostScript files, and allows to download sequences from EMBL/GenBank/UniProt using the Internet. Translated in YAML, it would be: - Source: seaview Section: non-free/science Priority: optional Maintainer: Debian-Med Packaging Team <debian-med-packag...@lists.alioth.debian.org> DM-Upload-Allowed: yes Uploaders: Charles Plessy <ple...@debian.org> Build-Depends: > debhelper ( >= 7 ), libfltk1.1-dev, libjpeg62-dev, libpng12-dev, libxft-dev, libxext-dev, zlib1g-dev Standards-Version: 3.8.1 Vcs-Browser: http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/debian-med/trunk/packages/seaview/trunk/?rev=0&sc=0 Vcs-Svn: svn://svn.debian.org/svn/debian-med/trunk/packages/seaview/trunk/ Homepage: http://pbil.univ-lyon1.fr/software/seaview.html - Package: seaview Architecture: any Depends: ${shlibs:Depends}, ${misc:Depends} Recommends: clustalw, muscle, phyml Description: | Multiplatform interface for sequence alignment and phylogeny SeaView reads and writes various file formats (NEXUS, MSF, CLUSTAL, FASTA, PHYLIP, MASE, Newick) of DNA and protein sequences and of phylogenetic trees. Alignments can be manually edited. It drives the programs Muscle or Clustal W for multiple sequence alignment, and also allows to use any external alignment algorithm able to read and write FASTA-formatted files. It computes phylogenetic trees by parsimony using PHYLIP's dnapars/protpars algorithm, by distance with NJ or BioNJ algorithms on a variety of evolutionary distances, or by maximum likelihood using the program PhyML 3.0. SeaView draws phylogenetic trees on screen or PostScript files, and allows to download sequences from EMBL/GenBank/UniProt using the Internet. Alternatively, the Description field could indicate with the markup that the first line is the short description. Either: Description: - Multiplatform interface for sequence alignment and phylogeny - | SeaView reads and writes various file formats (NEXUS, MSF, CLUSTAL, FASTA, PHYLIP, MASE, Newick) of DNA and protein sequences and of phylogenetic trees. Alignments can be manually edited. It drives the programs Muscle or Clustal W for multiple sequence alignment, and also allows to use any external alignment algorithm able to read and write FASTA-formatted files. It computes phylogenetic trees by parsimony using PHYLIP's dnapars/protpars algorithm, by distance with NJ or BioNJ algorithms on a variety of evolutionary distances, or by maximum likelihood using the program PhyML 3.0. SeaView draws phylogenetic trees on screen or PostScript files, and allows to download sequences from EMBL/GenBank/UniProt using the Internet. or: Description: Short: Multiplatform interface for sequence alignment and phylogeny Long: | SeaView reads and writes various file formats (NEXUS, MSF, CLUSTAL, FASTA, PHYLIP, MASE, Newick) of DNA and protein sequences and of phylogenetic trees. Alignments can be manually edited. It drives the programs Muscle or Clustal W for multiple sequence alignment, and also allows to use any external alignment algorithm able to read and write FASTA-formatted files. It computes phylogenetic trees by parsimony using PHYLIP's dnapars/protpars algorithm, by distance with NJ or BioNJ algorithms on a variety of evolutionary distances, or by maximum likelihood using the program PhyML 3.0. SeaView draws phylogenetic trees on screen or PostScript files, and allows to download sequences from EMBL/GenBank/UniProt using the Internet. As you see, in terms of human readability and writability, YAML does not bring advantages over the current format. I like YAML a lot, so if I overlooked something that would make it more suitable, please let me/us know ! Have a nice week-end, -- Charles Plessy Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
