Transition to TOML as configuration format & some other configuration changes #657
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Please let's not support multiple formats. That just makes everything worse. What about holding this (and maybe all other features) back for a month or two, then bringing this in to target |
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Alternatively, we can also just say that from now on, Studio |
…tings.toml` This is a breaking change! The configuration file can still be overwritten by `REACT_APP_SETTINGS_PATH` which means that if this variable is defined, this change is backwards compatible. This is important for Opencast 8.x. JSON is not a good format for a configuration file. In particular, we want to add some long strings to the configuration at some point, which is particularly ugly in JSON. Viable alternatives are YAML and TOML. While YAML is more familiar to many people in the Opencast community, TOML was chosen for its simplicity. This helps humans understand the config file at a glance and allows for very small parsers. The TOML parser used here is around 8kB minified+gzipped while the alternative YAML parser would be around 40kB minified+gzipped. I doubt that anyone in the Opencast community would have problems understanding or changing TOML files.
To maintain backwards compatibility, OC 8.x will continue to work with JSON settings files. But we also want to offer an integrated release that already works with TOML.
We still support encoded JSON for backwards compatibility. Luckily we
can just check if the decoded string starts with `{`: a stringified JSON
object has to start with that character, while that character is illegal
at the start of a TOML file.
Now only TOML settings are supported.
LukasKalbertodt
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Ok so, this is a breaking change now: JSON config support was dropped. We can do this breaking change as we target OC 9 now, see #666. With that, this PR would be ready again. If there are no other problems, I'd merge this the coming days. |
…ings, not as a path Specifying a large XML blob as JSON string was so terrible we decided to fetch `acl.xml` as another request. But TOML allows us to have good multiline strings, so specifying the ACL inline gets rid of a bunch of extra code and makes the app load faster.
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I now also changed how ACL is defined: it's inline in the TOML now, not as a path. See last commit for more information. I also rewrite the settings validation, making the whole code a lot more simple. |
LukasKalbertodt
changed the title
Closes #535
Closes #558
Partially unblocks #480
As discussed in #535 the only alternative options were TOML and YAML. There was some discussion without clear result. I applied the "Being Pragmatic" rule from the contribution guidelines and just picked TOML. It has the clear technical advantage of having a significantly smaller parser which improves app loading times. Furthermore, I can't imagine anyone having problems with modifying the example TOML file (given in
CONFIGURATION.md) to their liking.Notes about backwards compatibility: This would in theory be a breaking change. But as we still want to support Opencast 8, we can't break the configuration. As such, JSON is still allowed! To use a JSON config file,REACT_APP_SETTINGS_PATHhas to be set and end with.json. This is done in the release scripts for the OC 8 release. For the GET parameterconfig, JSON can be used, too.I plan on dropping this deprecated JSON support as soon as we target OC 9.
This is a breaking change!
CC @lkiesow @mtneug @JulianKniephoff