From: Clark C . E. <cc...@cl...> - 2002-05-19 18:01:55
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On Fri, May 17, 2002 at 09:00:52PM -0700, Brian Ingerson wrote: | At 13:00 18-May-2002 Clark Evans and Brian Ingerson are | scheduled to meet in Raleigh NC for a YAML mini-Summit. | Steve Howell and Ryan King will also be in attendance. We had fun. A few things of important interest: boolean: | We talked about boolean proposal and those in attendance seemed to favor !bool 1 or !bool 0 for the actual values. That said, we figured that we could introduce the concept of a pre-defined anchors. Namely, we could specify in the specification that *false is, by default, an alias to !bool 0, and *true is an alias to !bool 1 ; to help config files we can also specify *yes and *no as well. (and *mabye could be defined as !bool 0.5... just kidding) comments: | Oren's comment proposal was welcomed. In particular, I really like being able to use a comment after an alias: --- *true #This is a true value wiki: | We've decided to put up a Wiki for YAML. We would assimilate all of our "archtectural choices" with a page in the wiki. Unlike other Wiki's, we would not encourage "signing" style; edit the page if you can say it better, otherwise one should use the e-mail list for discussions. I think I heared that Steve would be the leader on this project... yes? This should help address Andrew's suggestion that we gather our core decisions and their rationale into a single repository. yaml-node: | We talked about a random access API for YAML. Specifically one that reflects the "generic" model. Ideally this API would be an extension of the yet-to-be-described pull-parser allowing random access interface. We would then implement YPATH, our transformation language, and other goodies using this API. In the new-rev of Neil's parser, he has replaced his initial "string" library with a pluggable string lib so that python/perl strings could be used. We would use the same technique allowing the nodes themselves to be replacable. ypath: | We talked alot about YPATH and how it would work. Also we reviewed a bit how XSLT works, and how we could write a transform language for YAML. We seemed to generate a good amount of buy-in from the participants around the table with regard to this... now comes the hard part, slowly fleshing it out. Steve/Ryan are going to implement what they need in Perl, and hopefully their requirements/needs will be summarized to the list so that we can collaboratively build a great YPATH. There didn't seem to be any objection to "modifying xpath" to meet our specific use cases, etc. users: | We talked about various use cases. Since I don't have the notes, I'll have someone else post this. To me it is quite a bit more use cases that I was originally thinking (mostly messaging). publicity: | Once the Wiki is going strong, we will use it to extract material to build several articles for journals. Also, we should start to find local conferences and get on the schedule. Brian is presenting at the next Perl conference. In another year or so we may want to have a mini-yaml conference... it'd probably be prudent to do this in close proximity to a good sized potential userbase. Eventually a book would be good (build from articles and the wiki), thus contributors to the wiki should license their content under a freeish license that would allow a publisher to make money for printing paper.. bindings: | We talked a bunch about the Perl/Python bindings and other language bindings. It seems that for emitting we have two related concerns: (a) a native object which may need to "explode" into many yaml-nodes; (b) the need to detect duplicate nodes so that anchors can be used only when needed. Brian was thinking of using "tie" instead of blessing... key-ordering: | For the emitter, we need to be able to specify key ordering (for easy reading). We were thining of a good standard way to do this. The hack which the perl library uses is simply a large list of keys, ordered as you would like. Antother approach is to store the "preferred" key ordering in the schema, or in a "styling" document. Thoughts? Hmm. There is lots more we talked about in the 4-5 hour meeting... and lots we didn't get a chance to cover. Best, Clark P.S. As always, this is from my "lossy" memory and may not accurately reflect the subtles of the actual events as they occurred. |