js-yaml introduces changes in behaviour

[confuser]

Authentication in one of our dev APIs was failing.

A client secret is defined as an integer within a config yaml file. Since the change over to js-yaml within this library, this means it's now being interpreted differently for some reason, and being rounded up.

Forcing it to a string by wrapping it within quotes does solve this problem but it's a major change in previous behaviour; which was quite unexpected and has caused a significant amount of time tracking this down on our side.

Example:

anAPI:
  clientSecret: 8421999999999995999

a127.init(function (config) {
    console.log(config.anAPI.clientSecret)
})

clientSecret becomes 8421999999999996000

Using 0.12.1 of a127-magic. Reverting to 0.11.2 this issue does not occur.

[theganyo]

I'm sorry you ran into trouble and had to expend effort tracking it down.

I've verified that this issue is, in fact, not precisely a problem with the yaml parser as it is actually has more to do with the interpretation of "integer" string by javascript. Perhaps the old yaml library interpreted the value as a string for some reason, but you can see that the Javascript interpreter itself (at least V8) does the rounding of the value if it's interpreted as an integer (which seems to be a correct interpretation according to the YAML spec):

node -e "console.log(8421999999999995999)"
8421999999999996000

Given this, I believe the resolution to simply quote the value to ensure it's interpreted as a string is not an unreasonable one.

That said, I've opened an issue with the js-yaml project since this is clearly unexpected behavior and other parsers don't have the same issue.

[confuser]

It's interpreted by default as a string within yamljs. Thanks for opening an issue with js-yaml.

[theganyo]

You bet. Although at this point it doesn't look as if they're especially interested in addressing it.

[confuser]

Indeed, doesn't look like it's going anywhere.

What's your preferred resolution? It's MIT so happy to fork on our side (Burberry) and add a warning notice when this occurs. Unless it's preferable for Apigee to take ownership over that. But then that'll add additional maintenance, so perhaps simply note this as a caveat on the readme for magic?

[theganyo]

If you're willing to submit a simple PR with the warning, perhaps they'd accept it? Otherwise, I'm thinking that we'd just document the issue...