Gmailctl – Declarative Configuration for Gmail Filters

Re:Gmailctl – Declarative Configuration for Gmail Filters by xg15 on Sunday March 29, 2020 @02:01PM (#22721085)

Huge respect to the author for ealizing this - however, I'm honestly sceptical of including yet another turing-complete configuration DSL without sufficient debugging capabilities.

Seems to me, now you've added several more sources of complexity:

- You have to get the JSONnet syntax right and learn about th various functionalities and expressions.

- You have to ensure Jsonnet is correctly translated into the GMail filter chain.

- You still have to ensure the GMail filter chain works correctly - this is one of the original problems this project set out to solve, but I don't understand what additional tools the project gives you to archieve this.

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Re:Gmailctl – Declarative Configuration for Gmail Filters by mbrt on Sunday March 29, 2020 @02:21PM (#22721263)

Author here. I understand your concerns, and in fact one of the last things I added is unit tests: https://github.com/mbrt/gmailctl/blob/master/README.md#tests

Getting things right is not easy, especially in complex languages like jsonnet. In my own experience though, every time you limit the expressivity of config languages you end up inventing even more complex workarounds in the end (e.g. external templating and things like that).

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