Make ak reliable

[bealdav]

It's difficult to update ak without the risk to break things

Actions that can be done:

• complete tests
• use .toml as spec file format because it's reduce the number of uses cases to test. Also Toml is more convenient for humans than yaml
• move could be done gradually

Then yaml is ok for repo.yaml and frozen.yaml (generated by machines)

biblio

• https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0518/#overview-of-file-formats-considered
• https://github.com/dbohdan/remarshal
• https://www.arp242.net/yaml-config.html

[rvalyi]

For the tests, could we just take a the spec.yaml of a dozen of our Akretion projects as a test input and test here that the output repos.yaml is always the one we have?
Would it be enough to make it significantly stronger?
What would be the other outputs to test?

[rvalyi]

as for toml, I agree, however I fail to see where our current format would be so annoying for humans. I think edition and reading is pretty straightforward, Is that about the error reporting? In that case I agree that error reporting sucks currently. Eventually if the such a migration were decided then it would be about adding a new parser and generating the same python internal representation and the same output, a gradual migration as you said. I'm not sure about the cost/benefit of such a move and how error reporting could be improved or not.

[sebastienbeau]

Hum on my side I do not know if it's a good idea to move to toml.

On my side I never had particular issue with the current yaml file. I am not saying that toml is not better, I am just saying that I didn't have any particular issue.

Moreover one thing that we should keep in mind is that in some complexe case we reuse the gitaggregate syntax for merging. Moving to toml will implies to have a differente syntax then gitaggregate for that case, so more stuff to learn

[bealdav]

Yes Seb,

But because of https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0518 we have to learn toml. We're not the guys in their old habits with setup.* in their libraries. Our packages should be up to date.

[hparfr]

If you want to implement pep0518 go ahead. But keep it mind this pep is only about the build dependency definition.

[florian-dacosta]

On my side, i agree with seb, it would be a shame to have a different format from gitaggregator...
It is not so rare when we have to reuse the gitaggregator syntax, on my side, it is even quite common.

We should move to Toml when gitaggregator will move to Toml
(speaking only about the spec.yml file of course)

[bealdav]

The purpose of this PR is "make ak reliable", toml is an hypothesis to achieve it. Please focus to the main target and which forces we can put on it. Thanks ;-)