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   Martin Schmitt (unixtippse@mastodon.online)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 17:18:24 JST Martin Schmitt

   How long has this #deb822 been in #Debian? The format looks crazy antiquated, like it precedes YAML, JSON, XML, INI and basically all of mankind. 🤔

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     Peter Krefting (nafmo@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 17:18:22 JST Peter Krefting

     in reply to

     @unixtippse I think the format is as old as #dpkg itself, so circa 1994.

     So, yes, it predates XML (1996), JSON (2000) and YAML (2001), but probably not Windows INI.

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     Martin Schmitt (unixtippse@mastodon.online)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 18:07:30 JST Martin Schmitt

     in reply to

     • Peter Krefting

     @nafmo So TIL deb822 is the name of the format of debian/control etc. and using it as the sources format is just an extremely late development. Still seems kinda weird to force a migration of one to the other, because it doesn't really fix the everyday sysadmin kludgework that is ad-hoc parsing and editing of source entries.

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     Peter Krefting (nafmo@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 18:07:30 JST Peter Krefting

     in reply to

     @unixtippse You're thinking about the Apt sources.list files? Yeah, considering the configuration files are in a different format, it is a bit weird.

     But the format is simple enough, and should be possible to parse with an email parser, and is used a lot in the dpkg ecosystem, so it makes some sense standardizing on it.