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TOML (lemmy.world)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43529621

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[–] 3 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Most of production failures in my company in last few years come from people making mistakes in yaml indentation.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (2 children)

    To me, that makes it sound like you're writing too much and too complex yaml files manually, and/or that you don't have good enough CI to catch invalid configurations. Unless, of course, you have very few prod failures overall, and the few that happen are due to yaml indentation, which I still think is a bit weird, since an invalid config caused by incorrect indentation should ideally be caught at compile time (if you're generating code from the yaml) or by some linter or something (if you're using it for config).

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    In yaml a mistake in indentation can easily result in a business error without config becoming invalid.

    Writing too much complex configs in files is a problem too ofc, we ended up moving a lot of stuff like that to a DB lately.

    I'm not a fan of indentation being logically meaningful not just in yaml. If you mess up indentation in python you can also get a technically valid code that's wrong logically.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    Oh, I definitely agree that meaningful whitespace can be a pain, and I'm not a very big fan in general (although I prefer meaningful whitespace like in Python to terribly indented code with regards to readability). I guess my point was just that if you're having a lot of failures due to incorrect indentation, it sounds like a systemic issue somewhere. While meaningful indentation can be annoying, I think it sounds like symptom of something more if it's responsible for most of your production failures.

    I think the bottom line for me is that if a config file regularly causes errors because of incorrect indentation, it should probably be refactored, since it's clearly not easy enough to read that those errors are caught.

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