As a sysadmin, my main requirements for configs are:
* Human-readable and writable, including on systems where you have only very basic text editing tools
* Easy to template (for example mass deployments via Ansible or other such tool)
* Easy to use with grep/sed/etc
The format I've found that is easiest to work with is what sysctl and OpenWRT use for their configs. You can have complex hierarchies, but every line stands on its own. This means you don't have to be careful about where in the config a particular line is, if it is in the proper block, etc. Also getting information on a particular sub-item is as easy as running a single grep command.
* Human-readable and writable, including on systems where you have only very basic text editing tools * Easy to template (for example mass deployments via Ansible or other such tool) * Easy to use with grep/sed/etc
The format I've found that is easiest to work with is what sysctl and OpenWRT use for their configs. You can have complex hierarchies, but every line stands on its own. This means you don't have to be careful about where in the config a particular line is, if it is in the proper block, etc. Also getting information on a particular sub-item is as easy as running a single grep command.