Re: YAML Was: CommitFest status/management

Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>

From: Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>
To: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, Ron Mayer <rm_pg@cheapcomplexdevices.com>, Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2009-12-05T00:42:16Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
> On top of that, if you did want YAML for easier readability, what
> aspect of the output is more readable in YAML than it is in text
> format?  The only answer I can think of is that you like having each
> data element on a separate line, so that the plan is much longer but
> somewhat narrower.  But if that's what you want, the JSON output is
> almost as good - the only difference is a bit of extra punctuation.

"almost as good" ... I agree with Kevin that it's more readable.

The whole patch just adds 144 lines.  It doesn't look to me like there's
significant maintenance burden involved, but of course I need to defer
to the more experienced.  It's even possible that we could reduce the
size of the patch still further if we really looked at it as just a
differently punctuated JSON.

Having compared the JSON and YAML output formats, I think having YAML as
a 2nd human-readable format might be valuable, even though it adds
nothing to machine-processing.

Again, if there were a sensible way to do YAML as a contrib module, I'd
go for that, but there isn't.

--Josh Berkus