[darcs-users] patch metadata, annotations, Ignore-this, tagging, etc

[Max Battcher]

On 3/22/2010 22:44, Petr Rockai wrote:
> twb at cybersource.com.au (Trent W. Buck) writes:
>
>> Max Battcher<me at worldmaker.net>  writes:
>>
>>> [...] Of course, RFC822 is full of loopholes and surprisingly hard to
>>> parse in reality [...]  I think I have a reasonable suggestion that is
>>> easier to parse than RFC822, but carries a similar effect: YAML
>>> formatted darcs comments.
>>
>> Can you support this claim?
> I agree with Trent in disagreeing. RFC822 is infinitely nicer for human
> readers than YAML, JSON and all the other postmodern plain-text-come-xml
> formats. This also means that it is the most backwards-compatible option
> we have, by the virtue of rendering nicely even if it is not rendered at
> all (i.e. displayed verbatim).

Ignoring the %YAML directive, and intentionally avoiding YAML tags, I 
think that a YAML mapping (key-value document) in the default "flowed" 
format looks exactly like RFC822. YAML provides more explicit data 
typing, and more explicit character escaping than RFC822. YAML 
ultimately is an attempt to make a useful data model like JSON look a 
lot more like RFC822, and I'm sure it takes plenty of learned knowledge 
from RFC822's experience...

Certainly all of this is subject, but I've actually done some work 
directly in writing YAML, precisely because I think it "renders nicely" 
when "not rendered at all".

--
--Max Battcher--
http://worldmaker.net