Make tinyyaml a standalone CTAN package

[zepinglee]

I'm planning to add CSL-YAML support for the citeproc-lua project (citeproc-lua/pr#29) and I find the tinyyaml parser inside the markdown package very useful. This module is also required by @kalekje's yamlvars. Is is ok to upload the YAML parser as a standalone package to ctan/texlive which would simplify the package dependencies.

[Witiko]

citeproc-lua project

What a cool project. Is it supposed to be a CSL-happy replacement of BibLaTeX?

Is is ok to upload the YAML parser as a standalone package to ctan/texlive which would simplify the package dependencies.

That would be appreciated. Please, let me know when you have released the package, so that I can use it to replace the markdown-tinyyaml.lua module shipped with the Markdown package.

[Witiko]

@TeXhackse We may replace the markdown-tinyyaml.lua file with a standalone package (likely without the markdown- prefix) in the near future. If I recall correctly, you were using markdown-tinyyaml.lua in your projects.

[TeXhackse]

That's not an issue. I have mappings there testing before that tinyyaml is found. The project we had was yamlvars, which was already mentioned.

[zepinglee]

What a cool project. Is it supposed to be a CSL-happy replacement of BibLaTeX?

Thanks! It's another approach of citation formatting.

That would be appreciated. Please, let me know when you have released the package, so that I can use it to replace the markdown-tinyyaml.lua module shipped with the Markdown package.

Sure.

[Witiko]

@zepinglee Have you got any news on this front?

[zepinglee]

I'm a little stuck with it. The api7/lua-tinyyaml only supports a subset of the YAML feature and it fails to parse several CSL-YAML items exported from Zotero. This is very likely to cause bugs to end users. I've made several patches to the project but they are still not enough. I'm not sure if I should go on with the YAML feature for citeproc-lua as well as maintaining a CTAN pakcage.

[Witiko]

@zepinglee Can you open issues in the api7/lua-tinyyaml repository for the remaining shortcomings that you have identified? I and the other contributors can help tackle them. When you are happy with the code, I can release the updated library as part of the Markdown package (markdown-tinyyaml.lua). Then, we can start worrying about a CTAN release. If necessary, I can maintain the package at CTAN and still provide markdown-tinyyaml.lua as a dummy library in the Markdown package for a while until everyone has transitioned to tinyyaml.lua (say, until Markdown 3.0.0).

[zepinglee]

I've uploaded the lua-tinyyaml to CTAN (https://ctan.org/pkg/lua-tinyyaml). It can be loaded via require("tinyyaml").

Sadly the api7 team does not plan to implement the full features of YAML because tinyyaml already meets their needs. I've fixed several bugs to make it work in most cases of citeproc-lua and CSL.

[Witiko]

Well done, thank you for letting us know! I will reopen this issue until we've started using tinyyaml in the Markdown package.

[Witiko]

Hi @zepinglee,

With version 3.9.0 of the Markdown Package for TeX from Nov 21, 2024, we dropped support for TeX Live 2022 and switched from distributing markdown-tinyyaml.lua ourselves to relying on your tinyyaml.lua on CTAN.

However, the CTAN version of tinyyaml still lists v0.4.3 and does not include:

• The official v0.4.4 release, which adds support for arrays of multi-line strings, and
• The latest commit from January 9, 2024 (api7/lua-tinyyaml@197632c), which adds support for nested numbers.

The nested numbers feature is especially important to us because the Markdown Package for TeX is type-sensitive and [1, 2, 3] would be processed differently from ["1", "2", "3"], see also istqborg/istqb_product_base#172 (comment).

Would you be open to publishing an updated version on CTAN? You might consider labeling it something like v0.4.4-1-g197632c (from git describe --tags --always --long) to distinguish it from the official v0.4.4 release.

Thanks again for maintaining tinyyaml!