Re: cleanups with long-term benefits (was Re: [PATCH] schemas: Add vim modeline)

[Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>]

On 03/08/20 13:28, Markus Armbruster wrote:
>>> We could remove them from the QAPI schema language.  Flag day, and
>>> git-blame becomes pretty much useless for a couple of years.
>> Is that a nack or a "whatever"?
> It's "is this really worth the trouble?"  I guess that's halfway between
> NAK and whatever, ready to be moved in either direction by arguments :)

In general it seems like a good idea to use a standard file format and
not "a standard file format except for two characters". :)  We also
wouldn't be having discussions on editors.

That said, after a bit more research I'm skeptical about the possibility
of using an off-the-shelf parser because most of them either don't
support comments, or are based on YAJL which simply discards comments.

Since '//' comments are harder to parse than "#" comments, this would
actually _add_ code instead of removing it.  Also since our doc comment
syntax uses "##" as a delimiter, we'd have to bikeshed what the doc
comments would look like ("//!", "///", etc.).

This means the two parts might be considered separately:

- replacing single-quote with double-quote strings

- replacing # comments with //

Paolo