What's needed is an internal data-structure that defines the state needed -- YAML declares the structure directly, but an alternative is to use either a DSL or

What's needed is an internal data-structure that defines the state needed -- YAML declares the structure directly, but an alternative is to use either a DSL or even a general-purpose language to build that data-structure. Of course, you could write code to generate your YAML, but the tooling is _not_ going to help you with that today. Maven and Gradle are examples of each of these methods -- both build up an internal model of the build, but while Maven uses XML, Gradle uses a Groozy DSL.