If you're developing a FOSS project, be aware of cryptobros trying to PR a tea.yml into it.

Open Source@lemmy.ml – 418 points – 4 months ago

Yet another "brilliant" scheme from a cryptobro. Naturally this caused a gold-rush for scammers who outsourced random people via the gig economy to open PRs for this yml file (example)

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Brief history of YAML:

"Oh no! All of these configuration file formats are complicated. I want to make things simpler!"

(Years go by)

"...I have made things more complicated, haven't I?"

YAML is generally good if it's used for what it was originally designed for (relatively short data files, e.g. configuration data). Problem is, people use it for so much more. (My personal favourite pain example: i18n stuff in Ruby on Rails. YAML language files work for small apps, but when the app grows, so does the pain.)

Ansible is using YAML and it's orders more readable than any other config engine, like puppet or cfengine.

Ideally, yes it can be beautifully written, certainly more than bash scripts.

With that said, I've also seen some hideous ansible scripts...

originally designed for (relatively short data files, e.g. configuration data)

This I can get behind. But because it’s not bad in those spaces folks think it’ll be a good idea in all spaces. Anchors do neat things, but organizing large files with YAML’s weird rules around quoting, & no support for tab indentation rub me the wrong way.