Hello Hartmut, > > so why would we 'abandon' s-exp, what would we win here? > It might be interesting to *create* these files using tools written in > other programming languages. And modules for creating *JSON* are > available for most programming languages. But that would be another tool, another package manager, not potluck... written by we don't know who, neither when ... and that would be a totally separate effort, that would not contribute to potluck ... which needs help (I wish I had the time...) Potluck package definitions are generated, adjusted 'by hand' - mostly to update the description, sometimes the copyright - then that is used to generated a Guix package, which is a Guile scheme module: It makes no sense to me that the potluck package representation would be anything but s-expr: actually, most guilers do the exact opposite :) - when an app or a lib either produces or needs xml, html, json ... the first thing they do is to transform these into s-expr, so these become (a lot more) readable and hackable ... > (OTOH TOML[]1] could be a better format than JSON – it's much like > .ini-files, but more formal specification... Absolutely terrible :):) I hope we never do that, at least not for the 'official' and maintained potluck package representation. Again, my 2c. David