CE-0002: Lists, Durations, Includes, and Variables in Configs

[Dominik Charousset]

Proposal Link: https://github.com/actor-framework/evolution/blob/master/proposals/0002-lists-durations-includes-and-variables-in-configs.md

The discussion so far took place on the PR: https://github.com/actor-framework/evolution/pull/2

Feel free to join in the discussion by replying to this mail. :)

[Thomas C. Schmidt]

Something to learn from the FRR Router implementation?

* FRR simply puts CLI commands into its config, so complexity and
parsing efforts decrease.

Ask Colin and Marcel about details.

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Prof. Dr. Thomas C. Schmidt
° Hamburg University of Applied Sciences Berliner Tor 7 °
° Dept. Informatik, Internet Technologies Group 20099 Hamburg, Germany °
° http://www.haw-hamburg.de/inet Fon: +49-40-42875-8452 °
° http://www.informatik.haw-hamburg.de/~schmidt Fax: +49-40-42875-8409 °

[matthias]

FWIW: in VAST, we already have a parser framework that implements the majority of this proposal: nested data, symbol table parsers, type checks, etc. Unfortunately it's reliant on C++14, otherwise we could have "migrated" it easily. I know that we have too many C++11-only users at this point, but perhaps some of the code translates without too much headaches, saving scarce developer time.

[Dominik Charousset]

FRR simply puts CLI commands into its config

That’s something they can get away with by restricting themselves to UNIX only. That would require to either do something different on Windows or shipping a full CLI parser/interpreter. Neither strikes me as a good idea.

Aside from that, users already rely on the .ini configuration format of CAF. Switching to something else would unnecessarily put obstacles in the way of existing users.

FWIW: in VAST, we already have a parser framework that implements the majority of this proposal: nested data, symbol table parsers, type checks, etc. Unfortunately it's reliant on C++14, otherwise we could have "migrated" it easily. I know that we have too many C++11-only users at this point, but perhaps some of the code translates without too much headaches, saving scarce developer time.

I think that’s a good option in the long run. I would love to replace the hand-written INI parser with something that’s easy to compose and extend. I’m not sure how much effort it would take to integrate this into CAF’s inspect API, though. The extensions in the proposal (lists, dates, variables) are straightforward to integrate into the existing parser. I’d say let’s explore the idea of integration VASTs parser framework at a later time, independently from this proposal.

    Dominik