I believe settings.json was a great addition to dub, something I've personally been wanting for a while. Allowing users to e.g. choose their default compiler without having to compile dub itself.

I'd like to extend it, for example by giving it the ability to use a specific Copyright / authors string by default, and by providing a default value for --cache. There are also a few bugs that need fixing (#1472 is trivial, for example).

However, currently, it suffers from one great downside which should make anyone wary of extending it: it is written in JSON.

JSON has proven to be a bad format for human-written configuration. Be it the lack of comments, noisy syntax, lack of typing... So much that a push was done to move to SDLang a few years ago.
However JSON enjoys wide support among editors and tools, and is still familiar to people than SDLang, the later being yet another skill a newcomer to D has to pick up.

Hence, I would like to bring forth the idea of changing settings.json to use a different format.
Out of all the markup languages out there, I my vote would go to YAML:

• Almost as widely supported as JSON;
• Easy enough to read;
• We have a great library to read/write it already.

I think the comparison is fairly simple.

Would love some opinion from DUB / settings.json users.