I'm sure when RPM first came about, it was probably less of a monstrosity. But like most things in the software world, people start bolting on new features, an

I'm sure when RPM first came about, it was probably less of a monstrosity. But like most things in the software world, people start bolting on new features, and you have a big mess. For most programs though, I would prefer a YAML config file. It's easy to serialize/deserialize for many languages, and you can adjust your init scripts / systemd units to spit out a new config on startup if you so choose. Or you can use something like ansible and some templates to generate that config once when you deploy your application (we're all using immutable infrastructure now, right?), although trying to template YAML files in jinja2 is a real PITA; I'd probably just write an application specific ansible module to dump out my config and skip the yaml jinja template part. That's the really nice thing about ansible, you can make it do all sorts of interesting stuff.