But that, and the parent's idea of binary formats in general, throws away the absolute golden property of text format configuration files: you can put those in git, and see with an accuracy of a single character what has changed. My impression was always that this was a huge reason for plain text files in the first place.

Someone mentioned protobufs, maybe with something like those one could have both?

> you can put those in git, and see with an accuracy of a single character what has changed.

You can use sqldiff[1]. Try adding it to your .gitattributes[2]. If you need TRIGGERs and VIEWs, consider dumping your database[3] instead.

[1]: https://www.sqlite.org/sqldiff.html

[2]: https://git-scm.com/docs/gitattributes

[3]: https://gist.github.com/peteristhegreat/a028bc3b588baaea09ff...

They don't type check though; most constraints arent enforced, and the underlying reality (slinging around mostly strings) leaks out often.

I agree this a pretty choice.