[hamandcheese]

I was not involved in the decision, but my guess is:

- xml is too verbose

- yaml is too complex + suffers some notable ambiguity issues

- json isn't very human friendly (no comments)

- a lot of other linux software uses ini-style configs

[mrweasel]

Maybe also to add to that: If you start having things like arrays and dictionaries available, people will start using them in their configuration and then configuration starts becoming an issue. I don't think I've seen a product where the configuration is in YAML or JSON, where the configuration files haven't grown into a confusing mess.

[Davidbrcz]

systemd is a different kind of a mess though

[olejorgenb]

JSON doesn't support comments is a big one (even though many people now are outright rebelling against this and storing "jsonc" inside .json files)