Configuration file improvement

[davidedelvento]

Are you open to use yaml (see example at http://www.yaml.org/start.html) or markdown for the config file, instead of json? If so which one do you prefer? I think yaml is more appropriate, but I'm open to both.
I think json is too verbose to be nice in a config file.

[davidedelvento]

You may assign this ticket to me (I can't, probably because of some permissions on the repo)

[matthewsucar]

We've talked about preprocessing the JSON to make it a little nicer. There were a few goals in choosing JSON, but basically we want something

• With robust and easy to use parsing libraries
• Not whitespace sensitive
• Able to easily handle as wide a variety of characters as possible (unicode, ...)
  • this is a bit security sensitive/running as root, so it has to be able to handle arbitrary user crazy
• Conveniently machine generatable
• Human readable
• At least string, integer and boolean types

Would be nice:

• Block Comments (missing in standard JSON)
• Inheritance/something like #include
• Well described by some widely recognized standards body
• Cryptographic signatures/trust
  • Generate a container image by a trusted dev system, copy it to the super for running

I'm not in love with JSON, but in the long run I expect we'll end up with some kind of template engine for this, so a little verbose isn't the end of the world. Most cases will be relatively straight-forward (or at least well understood) - mounting in NVIDIA, OFED, the common bits of /var/run, etc are all things that can be templated easily.

The main problem with the current setup is that it is a single file - but this shouldn't be difficult to fix