[throwaway892238]

RedHat basically sponsored the development of Systemd (among other things) so their full-throated support isn't surprising

also, fwiw, YAML is a data serialization format, not a configuration format. people who use YAML and pretend it's a config file format are either lazy, incompetent, or both.

[candiddevmike]

The industry disagrees with your hot take. Configurations will almost always be serialized into some kind of struct, YAML/JSON/TOML/etc work well for this. The neat part is you can use other tools to do the templating to YAML more intelligently, instead of having each tool DIY their own config templating setup.

[xyzzy_plugh]

Hot take? It's literally a data serialization language. Configuration != data serialization for, like, all of time.

No one is mincing words about YAML being used for configuration rather rampantly. They're saying it's a shitshow, and I agree.

> Configurations will almost always be serialized into some kind of struct

No, this is in fact a fairly modern phenomenon due to what I can only imagine is fear of compilers. The grand tradition is for configuration to be parsed and interpreted, which is rather distinct from serialization. Take your editor, or version control software of choice, or nearly every file in /etc, for example.

Standardizing things can be good, sure, and for all the warts YAML is at least consistent, usually, but it's a trend in the wrong direction.

Treating configuration as data is a Choice. I can hear them saying now "oh but being able to template or write a program to manipulate or edit configuration is so much better" -- take a look at how git config works. You can edit interactively with the CLI, read/write arbitrary fields, and yet it's not structured beyond INI style "key = value". There's no schema, and yet nothing is lost. There's certainly no Norway problem.

[db48x]

Possibly they are deliberately abusive towards their users.