Adding conditional support for JSON configurations instead of XML configurations

[Arnaldo Garcia]

Hello folks,

Given the not so recent news of expat being "understaffed and without funding" [1], I wanted to ask you all if you all are interested in adding support for a different configuration format like JSON or TOML.

In order to prevent breaking existing users of dbus-broker, this support could be introduced as a toggle so that the distributions decide when they want to enable one or the other and users slowly transition from XML into the new format (if they want to).

I probably will work on this soon, using JSON as the file format and json-c as the parsing library, so I can contribute the patches to benefit the community.

Kind regards, Arnaldo.

[1]: https://github.com/libexpat/libexpat/commit/8548bc03fdb887c8720f01e95440f1406bd15ffa

[David Rheinsberg]

Hi

On Mon, 31 Mar 2025 at 23:56, Arnaldo Garcia <asgar...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello folks,
>
> Given the not so recent news of expat being "understaffed and without funding" [1], I wanted to ask you all if you all are interested in adding support for a different configuration format like JSON or TOML.
>
> In order to prevent breaking existing users of dbus-broker, this support could be introduced as a toggle so that the distributions decide when they want to enable one or the other and users slowly transition from XML into the new format (if they want to).
>
> I probably will work on this soon, using JSON as the file format and json-c as the parsing library, so I can contribute the patches to benefit the community.

It would mean that we deviate from the reference implementation, which
we haven't done on such matters so far. I am personally not opposed to
a TOML based configuration, but the ultimate goal would rather be to
have no configuration at all, but have clients provide all their
information when establishing a connection.

I am not sure we are currently in a position where we want a new
configuration format, sorry.

Thanks
David