Comment by phendrenad2
10 hours ago
> the security world has been pushing CycloneDX and SPDX
> CycloneDX supports JSON, XML, and YAML
And SPDX is JSON.
Are there any other examples of government-mandated non-human-readable file formats? I feel like bureaucracies have a natural tendency to water down requirements such as this and instead focuses on getting wet signatures on pen-and-paper.
Or tag-value, which is actually preferred by many practitioners. Nesting is implicit in that format, but SBOMs should be mostly flat, anyway.
Unfortunately, T-V hs been dropped in SPDX 3.0.
It was dropped exactly because it was flat and it was becoming completely unmanageable.
SPDX v3 is based on a graph model that can represent hierarchies natively. It can then be serialized in a file, for example, in JSON format.
But it was the best format for manually creating an SBOM.
Most SBOM use cases don‘t need the ability to put your detailed software architecture in the SBOM.