What serialization formats could be used?

[supakeen]

Hi, we've started a discussion about making image definitions declarative in the osbuild ecosystem. This is right up the alley of this project.

I'm familiar with kiwi using XML, I'm familiar with osbuild using JSON and I'm familiar with osbuild-composer using TOML. I know @Conan-Kudo has spoken at least semi-favorably about TOML.

Are there any other serialization formats we should/could consider?

I've previously looked into both HCL and UCL but, especially the latter, suffers from not-wide-availability and the former defines no mechanism for inclusions.

[Conan-Kudo]

While kiwi's base format is XML (and provides a number of advantages on its own), we use the combination of anymarkup and xmltodict to be able to support other markup formats with kiwi (JSON, YAML, and even TOML) built on the XML schema.

It's an interesting model but I think is a very nice one for people who are fine with serialization formats with weaker guarantees.