Before we implement SDL package format for DUB

[Gary Willoughby via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 27 August 2014 at 15:07:22 UTC, Jonathan Marler 
wrote:
> IMO, ASON has a nice balance between being very simple and very 
> nice for humans to write/maintain.  I also think there are some 
> JSON variants that do the same thing, json5 looks nice, but it 
> doesn't support the SingularName feature that ASON does which 
> would fix the nesting issue.

I'm not necessarily arguing that Json is great or flexible. I'm 
arguing, well maybe arguing is a strong word, i'm positing that 
something more complicated than Json isn't really needed at this 
time.

I understand the argument that it would be nice for 
human-friendly constructs to be present in the dub file but is 
this really a problem dub is facing at the minute? Are lots of 
devs venting their spleens over not being able to include 
comments, heredoc strings and such in dub files? The dub registry 
is gaining traction lets not throw an obstacle in the road now.

Also inventing a Frankenstein format that is both a superset of 
Json and SDL just sounds horrible and just sounds wrong. It's 
just too much. Your effort would be better directed to something 
which is an immediate problem. Not re-inventing this particular 
wheel.

Sonke has said Json will always be an option in dub. Which is 
fantastic because now that dub has reached an official level as 
the de-facto package manager we need to embrace stability and 
stop this needless change which has been plaguing D forever.

I honestly think Ason should be abandoned as an unneeded solution 
looking for a problem and something more stable and recognised 
like Yaml or XML, etc. implemented in future *if needed* and 
actually if requested by dub's users.