[TazeTSchnitzel]

JSON is clunky, it's true, but it has advantages. It's very, very widely supported. There is no format versioning, there are no dialects, there is only One True JSON. It's incredibly minimal and supports no more, and no less, than it needs to.

It's not perfect, but it's a very good choice.

[tippytop]

But JSON doesn't support comments which are pretty nice in a config file. You can do the ugly comment as property stuff, or strip them out, but you're getting away from the One True Format.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

That's true. You could standardise on JSON with comments removed by JSMin... The underlying data would still be standard.

[darkandbrooding]

Consider Sendmail as a cautionary tale. One more than one occasion I have seen a busy sysadmin manually edit a .cf file and forget to backport the edit to the .mc file. The next time someone regenerates the .cf from the .mc you have a vanishing edit.

Yes, the sysadmin was clearly at fault. No, this is not a deal breaker, as seen by the longevity of Sendmail. But a config file that gets pushed through a preprocessor has a more complicated life cycle than a "static" equivalent.

If your organization has comprehensively embraced ansible/chef/puppet/etc this may be a non-issue, because all of your configs might be generated. Just food for thought.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

> Yes, the sysadmin was clearly at fault. No, this is not a deal breaker, as seen by the longevity of Sendmail. But a config file that gets pushed through a preprocessor has a more complicated life cycle than a "static" equivalent.

Er, only if the application doesn't run the preprocessor itself.