Re:Show HN: Relay – Event-driven DevOps automation
by impl on Thursday June 25, 2020 @06:25PM
(#23646465)
> 1) Please, please support some other config file other than just YAML.
Although we don't directly advertise it, you can in fact write a workflow in JSON and there's an underlying JSON interchange format that is authoritative in our system. We expect that any other languages we support would "compile" to this JSON format. What other languages are interesting to you? We've looked at CUE[0], HCL, and of course Puppet itself.
[0]: https://cuelang.org/
Re:Show HN: Relay – Event-driven DevOps automation
by bilmeswe on Thursday June 25, 2020 @09:16PM
(#23647748)
Also, Relay is built by Puppet, so not a separate company :)
Re:Show HN: Relay – Event-driven DevOps automation
by gitgud on Thursday June 25, 2020 @07:39PM
(#23647054)
I think the YAML hate is a bit exaggerated. It's not perfect but I would rather write out YAML than JSON or XML.
Besides it seems like this company (Relay) has gone to the effort of making a VScode language extension, which enables autocomplete and syntax checking in the YAML files. Which is cool.
Re:Show HN: Relay – Event-driven DevOps automation
by ahpook on Thursday June 25, 2020 @08:31PM
(#23647450)
FWIW we didn't make a separate extension, it uses the vscode-yaml extension from Red Hat, you just configure it to associate certain filetypes with our json-schema and custom tags. It is awesome for sure.
A couple things:
1) Please, please support some other config file other than just YAML. Even JSON would be an improvement, since you wouldn't have to change your config reader library. YAML has been a miserable nightmare to use in other tools like Open API Spec. I'm not alone in my YAML hate, either[1][2][3][4].
Implicit typing and semantic whitespace in a data file is insane. At least in Python, you're not unlikely to get an error if your whitespace is off. In a config file, you might just end up with dangerous/confusing behavior.
2) I'm surprised you used Relay, which is already used by Facebook. I don't think Facebook is going to care that much, but it's going to be really hard to Google this library.
1. https://dev.to/jessekphillips/stop-using-yaml-3kec
2. https://hitchdev.com/strictyaml/why/implicit-typing-removed/
3. https://devopsdays.org/events/2019-stockholm/program/philipp...
4. https://www.arp242.net/yaml-config.html