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Text simply means text format, not that "humans should read this". The human editability of text is a nice-to-have, but not a requirment of the format structure
by dismantlethesun 10y ago
Text simply means text format, not that "humans should read this". The human editability of text is a nice-to-have, but not a requirment of the format structure.
For a comparision, NPM has a packages.json which is hand-editable, and lots of people do customize it by hand to get their NPM scripts running, but:
a) If you're new to programming, you might be confused by which language it belongs to just like a requirements.txt
b) if you peek into it, you may not think it's generated, consumed, or editted by machines because JSON format is so readable
- cx1000 10y agoI never said humans should read it, just that it's human readable. And of course requirements.txt is technically human readable, but the problem is that it breaks scripts if you do anything other than pip freeze to it. This is obvious in the npm world (you better put JSON in a .json file!). My point is that the .txt extension doesn't give any hints to its use or that it's breakable, and that the name "requirements" doesn't describe the intended domain of the file (Python only). Even naming it "python_requirements.txt" would be an improvement.