We just document that this is how you write the config file:
[network]
bind.host = "127.0.0.1"
bind.port = 1234
# etc.
And that seems straightforward enough. Yeah, technically users can opt to use inline tables or raw strings or whatever, but they don’t have to.
I can kind of understand it after having to work with an XML file where users encoded data into comments for no good reason. But yeah, it does make JSON awkward for lots of potential use-cases.
I don’t feel like it will stray very far from what’s dubbed “TOML 0.1” in the meme. Yes, it has inline tables and as of TOML 1.1, they’re allowed to span multiple lines, so it’s technically not anymore illegal to do what’s in the meme. But all things considered, this is still a miniscule change compared to TOML 1.0.
Well, you can still decide how much of the TOML features you actually use in your specific application. For example, I’m currently involved in two projects at $DAYJOB where we read TOML configurations and we don’t make use of the inline tables that OP memes about in either of them.
Ultimately, the big advantage of TOML over INI is that it standardizes all kinds of small INI extensions that folks have come up with over the decades. As such, it has a formal specification and in particular only one specification.
You can assume that you can read the same TOML file from two different programming languages, which you cannot just assume for INI.
Well, Wikipedia does say:
The [TOML] project standardizes the implementation of the ubiquitous INI file format (which it has largely supplanted[citation needed]), removing ambiguity from its interpretation.
Counterpoints:
} or ] can also be a disadvantage of JSON, since you cannot stream it, i.e. start processing the fields/elements before the whole thing has arrived. (You probably still don’t want to use TOML for that, though. JSONL, CSV or such are a better idea.)Well, TOML is essentially just an extension of the INI format (which helped its adoption quite a bit, since you could just fork INI parsers for all kinds of programming languages).
And then, yeah, flattening everything is kind of baked into INI, where it arguably made more sense.
Although, I do also feel like non-techies fare better with flat files, since they don’t have to understand where into the structure they have to insert the value.
They just need find the right “heading” to put the line under, which is something they’re familiar with.
They serve largely different use-cases. JSON is good for serializing data. TOML is good for configuration.
It’s kind of bad for scripts, where it can be either annoying or genuinely problematic, when your script hangs on a password prompt. You typically do want it to just fail right away, because if you have monitoring, then you’ll be able to spot it failing.
These days, it is (largely reliably) possible to detect whether a command is being run interactively or as part of an unattended script, so you do see some commands that trigger a sudo password prompt only for interactive use, for example systemctl does this. But this adds quite a bit of complexity to each individual program, so it isn’t really something that’s going to be implemented universally.
I also have to say that systemctl kind of gets on my tits when it does that, because it throws up a GUI dialog for grabbing the password, which is quite jarring.
Most developers I’ve looked at would happily just paste the curl|bash thing into the terminal.
I mean, I typically see it used for installing applications, and so long as TLS is used for the download, I’m still not aware of a good reason why you should check the Bash script in particular in that case, since the application itself could just as well be malware.
Of course, it’s better to check the Bash script than to not check it, but at that point we should also advise to download the source code for the application, review it and then compile it yourself.
At some point, you just have to bite the bullet and I have not yet seen a good argument why the Bash script deserves special treatment here…
Having said that, for cases where you’re not installing an application, yeah, reviewing the script allows you to use it, without having to trust the source to the same degree as you do for installing an application.
One thing that will become important pretty quick if you continue making these scripts is that it’s almost always better to wrap your variables in quotes - so it becomes
yt-dlp -x “$a”.
Oh man, this reminds me of the joke that any program that’s more complex than Hello World has bugs – and folks still don’t even agree how to spell “Hello, World!”.
Of course, Bash is a particular minefield in this regard…
Is it? I work in tech and I would have not a single fucking clue…
Man, you have a lot of confidence in your ability to tell Rainmeter apart from Conky, Eww or the like, from just a handful of pixels…
Yeah, so many people swear by mechanical keyboards with a huge amount of key travel, and I never see it discussed that the key travel itself is problematic.
Man, I really hate how much they waffle. The only valid response is “You have to drive, because you need your car at the car wash in order to wash it”.
I don’t need an explanation what kind of problem it is, nor a breakdown of the options. I don’t need a bulletpoint list of arguments. I don’t need pros and cons. And I definitely don’t need a verdict.
Did you try on KDE since Plasma 6 came out? It introduced a native, manual tiling mechanism, which just needs to be configured by a KWinscript to make it automatic, so it still feels native when you resize the tiles. I’m pretty happy with Krohnkite these days either way…
Yeah, it likely won’t support that any time soon, because it’s incompatible with Extended Window Manager Hints standard.
Having said that, Plasma 6.6 (which just came out) allows for having only a single virtual desktop on non-primary monitors, which is all I wanted, personally…
KDE Plasma can do that, too, via a KWinscript: https://codeberg.org/anametologin/Krohnkite 🙃
On a more serious note, this is a genuine recommendation. I’ve been using Krohnkite and similar scripts for a few years now, and they’re absolutely fine, especially since Plasma 6 introduced a native, manual tiling mechanism, which they just have to configure.
Especially for newbies wanting to try out tiling window management, without having to figure out a minimalist environment like a bare window manager, this is a great entrypoint IMHO.
They’re not supposed to contain data, but some parsers will allow you to access what’s written into comments. And so, of course, someone made use of that and I had to extract what was encoded basically like that:
<!-- Host: toaster, Location: moon, --> <data>Actual XML follows...</data>My best guess is that they added this data into comments rather than child nodes or attributes, because they were worried some of the programs using this XML would not be able to handle an extension of the format.