Post #1658176
2026-04-25 00:01 UTC
Replies (5)
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@dmaonR@mastodon.online 2026-04-25 01:53
@cks@mastodon.social I was about to "upgrade" isc dhcpd wtih kea until I saw that. New deployments will probably be dnsmasq instead. Which has its own problems. I have a hard time trusting a dev team that thinks json is a suitable format for a human edited config file. What other anti-pattern have they used?
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@cks@mastodon.social 2026-04-25 19:46
If your program's configuration file format is JSON, you're openly advertising that you care far more about programming convenience in reading and loading your configuration file than you do about the people operating your software. "You can generate our JSON with software from something else", yeah, no. You've told me what your priorities are and I'm going to believe you. I would rather run software that actually cares about the people running it.
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@balki@social.balki.me 2026-04-25 04:27
@cks@mastodon.social I usually convert to yaml, edit and then convert to json back in my editor. If the goal is to keep dependency free, json is usually the only option as it is available in stdlib in most languages.
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@waffles@masto.yttrx.com 2026-04-25 20:11
@cks@mastodon.social I used to use a sandwich combination of = separated kv pairs in a global config, followed by libpopt ( https://manpages.debian.org/testing/libpopt-dev/popt.3.en.html ) to handle runtime overrides with an additional override of a per user override kv config file. It was very user friendly but a huge PITA from a developer perspective. Now all software I wrote (for work) uses straight up JSON for inputs. But that json is generated from thrift schemas which are managed by a python DSL, so it all kinda works.
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@curious_carrot@mastodon.social 2026-04-25 21:06
@cks@mastodon.social Apologies, I might be asking a question you already answered. What would be a more user-friendly data format? What would you recommend?