Move stellar.txt => stellar.json before adoption gets to large? about stellar-protocol

[irisli]

I like the idea of moving stellar.txt to something that is easier to parse. Still Any change from stellar.txt to another format will reduce the need for custom stellar.txt parsers.

With JSON, we lose the ability to add comments [semantically]. Most JSON parsers don't allow comments and is not allowed in the JSON spec. We will have to make this choice carefully since it's a big part of the protocol on how users interact with gateways.

Yaml is a great alternative since it is more human readable (optional newlines) and supports comments. In both the short and long term, it should be fine to use yaml since it has a well defined spec and libraries for it are fairly common.

In YAML, it could be organized like this:

federation_url: "https://api.stellar.org/federation"
reverse_federation_url: "https://api.stellar.org/reverseFederation"

accounts: 
  - "gJGPgbCnaP3vypwoxtXWEn9tyoARywPE7F"
  - "gJGPgbCnaP3vypwoxtXWEn9tyoARywPE7F"
currencies: 
  USD: "gJGPgbCnaP3vypwoxtXWEn9tyoARywPE7F"
  SCT: "gDSSa75HPagWcvQmwH7D51dT5DPmvsKL4q"

# This is a comment
validators: 
  nakuKsirzNq66iejBfxKxt8Rw4t7kP5ZWSrvWzVKEVSHSkJKYd1: "SDF1"
  n3gVwaSDBtVi4Xd2XBh7rvcwis4uBabu5aNn7WKtEqazJbLHR9n: "SDF2"
  nfozTPzMytTKuuHBJrPB9DVxPccKeNVh8vsEomUAwNWuWrNxwDB: "SDF3"
  naSBAykwFkmw6JLKqPG7HPFMK1GZqu1rdnwbhtTxyTmVX1b6b8z: "SDF4"
  nf3yCmpieMFvAbv5r5jBhGeXheuhc3boAkdmBbpXb6HC7HDkf13: "SDF5"

[irisli]

One thing though is that there are disadvantages with yaml such that the specification is extremely long. It's not as simple as just picking one spec. Another alternative is toml: https://github.com/toml-lang/toml

I think that before we pick a new format for stellar.txt, we need to have a discussion before quickly just picking another format without analyzing the costs and benefits.

[nullstyle]

TOML 👍

[bartekn]

Problem with TOML is that:

Latest tagged version: v0.2.0.

Be warned, this spec is still changing a lot. Until it's marked as 1.0, you should assume that it is unstable and act accordingly.

I think YAML is simpler and cleaner than JSON and has built-in/package parsers in most of popular languages.

[caiges]

What are the advantages to having semantic comments available in the structure of the file to be parsed (for the purposes of stellar.txt -- not in the general sense)? Most JSON documents are to be consumed using a known structure either by definition, documentation or by discovery. I'm definitely in favor of something other than a plain text file for a structured set of data. +1

[nullstyle]

@caiges comments are useful (to me, at least) when you look at the currencies list which is expressed as a (currency code, address) pair. Being able to include a comment that gives a name to that address is useful for me.

That said, I would also prefer a more structured format, such as TOML or YAML.

[caiges]

@nullstyle I can understand that. I would lean more towards JSON as it's arguably more familiar and more easily consumed (just by an arbitrary survey of standard libs of various languages).

[jedmccaleb]

this is done now. we went with stellar.toml