[chef-dev] Re: Re: Re: Re: Dialect support and loading enhancements

[Ranjib Dey < >]

i second dan's comment.  Examples that you have given are not dialects, they are more like rendering system. Salt has it already. Chef already has to_json/from_json and to_text support for resources (albeit the to_text method is buggy), so you should be able to  communicate with chef or use chef components as it is, as long as the other system is eating/spitting json. If you want to write a component in other language, why not take that route?

It makes more sense to make to json support in core chef more stable and extensible.

Also i find it hard to understand that yaml or json is more readable than their ruby counterpart.  they look and feel readable in low volume, but  at large scale, they are nightmare. they were meant for serialization, why you want to check them inside code base, when you can generate the same with smaller codebase using a language ?

On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 2:18 PM, Noah Kantrowitz < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

On Oct 2, 2013, at 2:05 PM, Daniel DeLeo < "> > wrote:

> Chatted with the other folks at Opscode, and here's what we want to do
>  (you can read this as a gist if the formatting is messed up: https://gist.github.com/danielsdeleo/18c4e4e2bba6eff922d4 ):
>
> # Summary:
>
> * Yes to "tiny" cookbook layouts
> * Yes to removing implicit filespecificity
> * Yes to user-defined, explicit filespecificity
> * Yes to modular, modifiable code that can support dialects
> * No to including any dialects in core or supporting them beyond
>   best-effort Open Source Community courtesy.

Which dialects do you mean in particular? Ruby support itself is now setup as a dialect, so that one needs to be there. Beyond that I'm working on expanding the dialect system to encompass the decoder dispatch for stuff like metadata.{rb,json}, role files, and env files all of which will mean a built-in JSON dialect in addition to the Ruby one. Then there is the JSON and Yaml dialects I setup for attribute files, just to be clear I think you are suggesting those should be relocated to external cookbooks?

--Noah