SCM/CI workflows: YAML is too unergonomic and difficult to validate

[mia-0]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Gonna be honest, YAML has bad ergonomics. It’s too easy to get the whitespace wrong in some line, or forget to have a - somewhere, and then the webhook endpoint just responds with a 500.

Minimal syntax is all well and good, but go too far and it becomes ambiguous. Users should not have to trigger runs to find out if they formatted their workflows in the way OBS expects, and it should not be this easy for incorrect nesting to be hiding in plain sight because of a missing space character.

Describe the solution you'd like
Use a format with obvious nesting, item and value syntax that may be more verbose but makes it easier to “express what you mean”. TOML, for example.

Describe alternatives you've considered
More detailed documentation and tools/API endpoints to validate workflows maybe. But those would not fix YAML’s problems.

[hennevogel]

in the way OBS expects

It's not OBS that expects this, it's YAML. There are plenty of YAML syntax validators you can use...

We decided for YAML because of it's widespread use, especially for this kind of work on SCMs like Github/Gitlab etc. I doubt we'll ever change it...

[mia-0]

Valid syntax doesn’t mean valid structure.

[hennevogel]

Valid syntax doesn’t mean valid structure.

For sure not but you mentioned syntax errors. We have some form of schema validation in our backlog already -> https://trello.com/c/MOmW3O8I

[mia-0]

I did not mention syntax errors at all, but I can see how it could be interpreted like that.

[mia-0]

This is just my personal opinion but I think the only reason YAML is seeing any use is the Rails ecosystem and its fetish for poor design choices. Can’t imagine end users would have had a problem with using something else.
It might be a bit late in the game to change it, but then again I’m not sure this work-in-progress feature has all that many users yet.