Standard JSON notation for UVL product configurations

[miguelrluaces]

Motivation

There is currently no common notation to describe a concrete product configuration for a UVL model. As a result, each tool in the UVL ecosystem defines its own configuration format. For example, tools such as UVLS or Flamapy may represent product configurations slightly differently, even when they operate on the same UVL model. This makes interoperability harder: a configuration produced by one tool cannot necessarily be consumed by another without ad-hoc conversion logic.

If UVL aims to be a common language for variability models, it would be useful to also define a common representation for product configurations. Such a format could support:

• exchanging configurations between UVL-compatible tools;
• storing example products or test configurations alongside UVL models;
• validating whether a configuration is valid for a given UVL model;
• enabling tool-independent benchmarks and examples;
• reducing duplicated effort across tools.

The idea is to define a simple JSON-based notation for UVL product configurations. The format proposed by existing tools could be cosiderd as the approved notation, converting a de facto standard into a de iure standard.

Expected outcome

The goal of this discussion is to determine whether the UVL community considers a standard product configuration format useful and, if so, to collect requirements before preparing a formal UVLEP draft.

[SundermannC]

Hi @miguelrluaces,
thanks a lot for starting the discussion. I fully agree that a standardized config format would be valuable. Judging from my previous discussions on that I also assume that many in the community would be very happy about it.

I think using the already employed JSON formats as a starting point is very reasonable. Maybe we could also use this opportunity to refine the current notation if needed.