From: why the lucky stiff <ruby-talk@...>
Date: 2004-11-25T16:36:30+09:00
Subject: YAML Problems Clearinghouse (Re: Marshal vs. YAML...)

Austin Ziegler wrote:
> Well, I should qualify my statements some, because I don't want to
> maling _why's work, which is nothing short of amazing, ultimately.

Austin, you need not worry.  I'd really rather hear frustrations come 
out openly and bluntly.  Having them concealed and timid only prevents 
me from knowing how to improve my libraries.  I appreciate your being 
forthright.

> Ruwiki has specific needs that may or may not be present in a
> generic application that needs something externally editable. In
> particular, Ruwiki files can be large because of the content --
> which is a large \n-delimited string. For a Ruwiki file at work and
> for the Ruwiki::WikiMarkup pages, syck failed (as in coredump) in
> Ruby 1.8.1 on Windows on writing strings longer than about 7k and
> reading strings longer than about 4k. I don't think it was a
> Windows-only problem. In Ruby 1.8.2p2, syck was confused by \n and
> sometimes escaped them when it shouldn't, resulting in unusable
> code.

I'm sure syck can handle large quantities of text, as well as continuous 
strings, since the (Poignant) Guide and my blog have both been using 
syck since February of this year.  But I definitely don't use the 
emitter (the outputting component of syck) as much as your wiki must.

I feel that syck's parser is quite strong, but the emitter is very poor 
in comparison.  Would you offer up your time in helping me test and kill 
further bugs in the emitter?  (This is an open invitation to any of you 
out there who have an interest in improving YAML support.)

> I prefer YAML to XML for most editable configuration files, but YAML
> has its own issues.

You've mentioned coredumps on outputting YAML and oddities with line 
endings.  Did I miss anything else?  Could you outline exactly what 
other issues you've encountered?

And do they revolve centrally around the Syck implementation or are they 
related to the nature of YAML and its specification?

_why