Re:A developer goes to a DevOps conference
by linuxftw on Sunday September 29, 2019 @11:00AM
(#21107389)
I'm sure when RPM first came about, it was probably less of a monstrosity. But like most things in the software world, people start bolting on new features, and you have a big mess.
For most programs though, I would prefer a YAML config file. It's easy to serialize/deserialize for many languages, and you can adjust your init scripts / systemd units to spit out a new config on startup if you so choose. Or you can use something like ansible and some templates to generate that config once when you deploy your application (we're all using immutable infrastructure now, right?), although trying to template YAML files in jinja2 is a real PITA; I'd probably just write an application specific ansible module to dump out my config and skip the yaml jinja template part.
That's the really nice thing about ansible, you can make it do all sorts of interesting stuff.
Re:A developer goes to a DevOps conference
by platz on Sunday September 29, 2019 @12:23AM
(#21105068)
https://dhall-lang.org/ No tarpit here (no Turing Completeness or recursion), and as DRY as you want.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit
Any time you take a language like bash that's ALREADY deeply muddled in the Turing Tarpit, and then try to make up for its weaknesses by wrapping it up in yet another arbitrary syntax that you just pulled out of your ass like .spec, you're even worse off than you were when you started. Why pick a terrible language like bash that's no good for reading and writing and manipulating structured data formats like CSV, JSON, YAML, INI, or XML, and then try to "fix" it, when there are so many much better well supported off-the-shelf alternatives that don't require re-inventing the square wheel, like Python, JavaScript, or Lua?