No; GitHub shouldn't support YAML anchors because it's a deviation from the status quo, and the argument is specifically that the actions ecosystem doesn't need to make analysis any harder than it already is.

(As the post notes, neither I nor GitHub appears to see full compliance with YAML 1.1 to be an important goal: they still don't support merge keys, and I'm sure they don't support all kinds of minutiae like non-primitive keys that make YAML uniquely annoying to analyze. Conforming to a complex specification is not inherently a good thing; sometimes good engineering taste dictates that only a subset should be implemented.)

▲

btreecat 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> No; GitHub shouldn't support YAML anchors because it's a deviation from the status quo, and the argument is specifically that the actions ecosystem doesn't need to make analysis any harder than it already is. > > (As the post notes, neither I nor GitHub appears to see full compliance with YAML 1.1 to be an important goal: they still don't support merge keys, and I'm sure they don't support all kinds of minutiae like non-primitive keys that make YAML uniquely annoying to analyze. Conforming to a complex specification is not inherently a good thing; sometimes good engineering taste dictates that only a subset should be implemented.)

That's a long way to say "yes, actually"

	▲	woodruffw 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> That's a long way to say "yes, actually" "Because I don't like it" makes it sound like I don't have a technical argument here, which I do. Do you think it's polite or charitable to reduce peoples' technical arguments into "yuck or yum" statements like this?

▲

VGHN7XDuOXPAzol 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Conforming to a complex specification is not inherently a good thing

Kind of a hard disagree here; if you don't want to conform to a specification, don't claim that you're accepting documents from that specification. Call it github-flavored YAML (GFY) or something and accept a different file extension.

https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/1182

> YAML 1.1 to be an important goal: they still don't support merge keys

right, they don't do merge keys because it's not in YAML 1.2 anymore. Anchors are, however. They haven't said that noncompliance with YAML 1.2 spec is intentional

	▲	woodruffw 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Call it github-flavored YAML (GFY) or something and accept a different file extension. Sure, I wouldn't be upset if they did this. To be clear: there aren't many fully conforming YAML 1.1 and 1.2 parsers out there: virtually all YAML parsers accept some subset of one or the other (sometimes a subset of both), and virtually all of them emit the JSON object model instead of the internal YAML one.