[Opinion] We should not offer more than one alt language

[ppalaga]

Many people incl. me do not like XML because of its verbosity. OTOH it is a great advantage to be able to see the same format and use the same set of tools on all possible Maven projects on the internet. Bringing too much choice would completely break this advantage. I'd be for pushing just a single alternative language and concentrate on supporting it comparably well as XML today.

I could live with any of the four formats, but if I had to choose, here is my personal order of prefs:

1. JSON5 (relaxed JSON with comments; well known, enough libs; jackson can do that)
2. Hocon (elegant, but not so popular and well supported throughout languages)
3. YAML (hard to work with large docs), TOML (unknown in Java world)

[linghengqian]

Personally, I prefer pom.yaml. After all, the popularity of https://github.com/JetBrains/amper indicates that quite a few people want to write Gradle configuration files using YAML, and this trend can be directly extrapolated to Maven. Of course, no one should be using Maven to develop iOS applications so far.

[xenoterracide]

yaml anchors make it the superior format (tm); if you aren't using anchors you're losing out on the big reason for it. Gradle added libs.versions.toml, but I can see a give or take there. JSON5 is relatively unknown everywhere (urgh, JSON, JSONC, JSON5, HOCON 🤦🏻 ), but it's superior to JSON.

Maybe the best argument for this is lighter-weight install... but that would imply a different plugin per language you want to do, maybe a handful under one because the same parser.