Note to self: opinions and experiences from some people I asked

[LukasKalbertodt]

I asked a bunch of people who are very used to dealing with config files for their opinions. To not lose that information, here it is:

• Defaults in config templates?
  • The commented out value should probably always be the default value.
  • The default should probably also be mentioned explicitly in the comment above.
  • A useful example value should be in the comment, not in the commented-out value
• What file formats are relevant today?
  • TOML, YAML, JSON5
  • INI-like thingies (systemd, freedesktop): basically replaced by TOML, one should use TOML as it's well defined.
  • Used in the wild but usually bad for various reasons:
    • JSON
    • XML
    • ...
• Loading a list of values from an environment variable
  • Widely used separators: :, ;, ,,
  • Or [foo,bar] syntax
  • Or JSON syntax
  • But generally always pretty shit. No good solution.
  • No one syntax works for every value.