ruyaml usage; Removing needed quotes

[martinhoyer]

Question

Hi,
looking at ruyaml repo, it looks like there is not much development happening for past couple of years. Do you plan to keep using it in this project?

Might not be related to the parser, but I've hit for example this issue:

ISCSI_INITIATORNAME: iqn.1994-05.com.redhat:test
ISCSI_IFACES: [{iscsi_ifacename: 'qedi.00:00:00:00:00:00', setup: {ipaddress: 172.16.0.86}, targets: [{portal: 172.16.0.10}]},
  {iscsi_ifacename: 'qedi.00:00:00:00:00:01', setup: {ipaddress: 172.16.1.86}, targets: [{portal: 172.16.1.10}]}]

yamlfix will re-format the file to:

ISCSI_INITIATORNAME: iqn.1994-05.com.redhat:test
ISCSI_IFACES:
  - {iscsi_ifacename: qedi.00:00:00:00:00:00, setup: {ipaddress: 172.16.0.86}, targets: [portal: 172.16.0.10]}
  - {iscsi_ifacename: qedi.00:00:00:00:00:01, setup: {ipaddress: 172.16.1.86}, targets: [portal: 172.16.1.10]}

..which unfortunately removes the strings from the mac-address-like string.
When I then want to use the yaml file in program relying on ruamel.yaml:

ruamel.yaml.scanner.ScannerError: while scanning a plain scalar
  in "<unicode string>", line 3, column 23
found unexpected ':'
  in "<unicode string>", line 3, column 30

Running yamlfmt adds the quotes back.

[lyz-code]

Hey @martinhoyer, thanks for taking the time to open an issue. We use ruyaml because it was a fork maintained by the community, if it's not maintained anymore we can think of migrating to a new yaml parser, do you know anyone that is active?

Regarding your issue at hand I see two solutions:

• Report the bug upstream (which we know won't probably get any attention soon)
• Fix it here

If you go for the second, I think it would be nice if you could add the link on the upstream bug report so that once its fixed we can remove that piece of code

[martinhoyer]

Hey @lyz-code, thanks for the reply!

last time I checked there wasn't really any 'golden bullet' for yaml parsing in Python. Ruyaml being drop-in replacement to ruamel.yaml, maybe the switch to ruamel.yaml, which is being maintained (from what I can tell) and is released under MIT license could be relatively pain-less?

[lyz-code]

I lived the whole migration from ruamel.yaml to ruyaml, and one of the reasons was that the first one is maintained by a benevolent dictator. I hate those kind of projects, and prefer the community maintained ones. I'm not saying no to migrating back, but there must be real benefits (like this issue being solved or other ones with the upstream blocked value) before I'd like to have such a dependency.

[martinhoyer]

100% understandable. I've also encountered some issues with ruamel.yaml.
There is also StrictYAML - what are your thoughts on using that?

[lyz-code]

I don't know the project so I can't give a based judgment. I've skimmed through their docs and it looks ok, but until we do a deep analysis of the pros and cos we won't know for sure

[linceaerian]

Hello,

I can confirm the issue for the "removal of needed quote", for instance in module https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/containers/podman/podman_container_module.html

The volume use a syntax of "host mp:container mp" like :

    volumes:
      - "/var/www:/usr/share/nginx/html"

But the fix remove the quote like:

volumes: [/var/www:/usr/share/nginx/html]

Which then cause errors similar to:

ERROR! We were unable to read either as JSON nor YAML, these are the errors we got from each:
JSON: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

Syntax Error while loading YAML.
  found unexpected ':'

The error appears to be in '/home/main.yaml': line 26, column 23, but may
be elsewhere in the file depending on the exact syntax problem.

The offending line appears to be:

      separator: ''
    volumes: [/var/www:/usr/share/nginx/html]