ejabberd.yml atoms/strings don't play nice with yaml generating tools

Created on 9 Dec 2017 · 4Comments · Source: processone/ejabberd

What version of ejabberd are you using?

16.01

What operating system (version) are you using?

Ubuntu 16.04

How did you install ejabberd (source, package, distribution)?

Package

What did not work as expected? Are there error messages in the log? What
was the unexpected behavior? What was the expected result?

Ejabberd doesn't treat double, single, or no-quoted strings equivalently. Going by #825 this is because its underlying tech distinguishes between two data types, "atom" and "string", that yaml has no concept for. This makes programmatically generating conf files difficult, because "normal" yaml tools (e.g. pyyaml, or in my case the yaml filter in Saltstack) emit them interchangably. You can see the effect by loading the default conf file in pyyaml and then writing it out again. The result is yaml-equivalent (according to diffyaml, at least), but crashes ejabberd.

It is unclear from #825 whether this has been, will, or won't be fixed. I certainly still have the problem in my version.

Is there a way to convince ejabberd to implicitly convert strings and atoms as needed? Failing that, is there an easy way to "sanitize" an ejabberd.yml config to enforce correct quoting? Failing that, is there a list somewhere of which options expect atoms, and which expect strings, so I can write such a script myself?

Source