YAML document from hell (2023)
ruudvanasseldonk.com
YAML document from hell (2023)
1–10 of 144 posts
Re: YAML document from hell (2023)
#2The Norway problem drives me a bit nuts.
In a lot of the Ansible documentation, yes/no are used instead of true/false. When seeing this in the official docs, I used it, figuring this was the preferred convention in Ansible. These days it now throws warnings or lint errors, so I’m updating it all over the places as I find it. Yet the Ansible documentation still commonly uses it.
Re: YAML document from hell (2023)
#3This one is amazing, I almost pissed myself laughing reading it. So true about YAML. Another caveat is using --- as section separator in the file. It will starts new file inside your existing file.
Still love it.
Re: YAML document from hell (2023)
#4I’m amazed how sane the “document from hell” looks.
The author didn’t even get into the weird stuff GitLab does with YAML too!
Re: YAML document from hell (2023)
#5Almost all of this is solved by basically putting quotes around strings.
Yaml has its uses cases where you want things json doesnt do like recursion or anchors/aliases/tags. Or at least it has had - perhaps cue/dhall/hcl solves things better. Jsonnet is another. I havent tried enough to test how much better they are.
Re: YAML document from hell (2023)
#6The n, no, off thing is just sad. It's a 100% avoidable issue. But whoever put that into spec was just so clever that they overflew and became stupid.
Re: YAML document from hell (2023)
#7The n, no, off thing is just sad. It's a 100% avoidable issue. But whoever put that into spec was just so clever that they overflew and became stupid.
This is basically every problem in YAML. Someone couldn't resist adding more stuff and either didn't realise or didn't care about the ambiguities it created.
Re: YAML document from hell (2023)
#8Wow, I wasn't aware there was so much magic and arcane features in yaml. Great post. Thanks.
Re: YAML document from hell (2023)
#9Discussion from 3 years ago, when this was originally posted:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34351503 , 566 points, 358 comments
Re: YAML document from hell (2023)
#10The Norway problem drives me a bit nuts. In a lot of the Ansible documentation, yes/no are used instead of true/false. When seeing this in the official docs, I used it, figuring this was the preferred convention in Ansible. These days it now throws warnings or lint errors, so I’m updating it all over the places as I find it. Yet the Ansible documentation still commonly uses it.
It depends on how they parse/decode/unmarshal the file. If they use a "generic" yaml parser, no will be translated to false. But if the parser knows the types of the data structure, or can be instructed not to replace certain strings, or has hooks, it can treat no as a string. So it might be that the linter doesn't operate like the parser.