Seems to me that YAML just needs type/schema support to be less of a hurdle. As an alternative, the encoding/decoding roundtrip using protobuf seems reasonable

Seems to me that YAML just needs type/schema support to be less of a hurdle. As an alternative, the encoding/decoding roundtrip using protobuf seems reasonable to me, catches the footgun of using floating-point version numbers (it becomes a parse error), whitespace/multiline concatenation being more obvious, and allowing comments (compared to JSON): ( cat << EOF # yes, comments are allowed name: "Python package" on: "push" build { python_version: ["3.6", "3.7", "3.8", "3.9", "3.10"] steps: [ { name: "Install dependencies" run: "python -m pip install --upgrade pip\n" "pip install pytest\n" "if [ -f 'requirements.txt' ]; then pip install -r requirements.txt; fi\n" }, { name: "Test with pytest" run: "pytest\n" } ] } EOF ) | protoc --encode=Config config.proto | protoc --decode=Config config.proto name: "Python package" on: "push" build { python_version: "3.6" python_version: "3.7" python_version: "3.8" python_version: "3.9" python_version: "3.10" steps { name: "Install dependencies" run: "python -m pip install --upgrade pip\npip install pytest\nif [ -f \'requirements.txt\' ]; then pip install -r requirements.txt; fi\n" } steps { name: "Test with pytest" run: "pytest\n" } }