Alternate YAMLSpecification load classmethod

[ben-bay]

It would be useful if YAMLSpecification had a class method that accepted yaml in string form (instead of a path to a yaml file), as follows:

@classmethod
def load_spec_from_str(cls, string):
    # loads python objects from the yaml string, returns a YAMLSpecification

If that method existed, load_specification could just call it:

@classmethod
def load_specification(cls, path):
    with open(path, "r") as f:
        return YAMLSpecification.load_spec_from_str(f.read())

[FrankD412]

So, l was looking at loading from a string as specified above. It turns out that the yaml module does not have a loads variant of their parsing API (in a fashion akin to json which has a load for stream objects and loads for string objects). Considering most libraries will support stream objects (like file pointers) by default, I almost wonder if providing an API that takes in a stream is more flexible than limiting to a string. With the structure mentioned in your post, I would have to initialize a StringIO object from the string. If I can just assume a stream object from the start, it makes the API more flexible because it means I don't need to add APIs for all types of classes. At that point, it becomes the responsibility of the caller to conform streams.

@ben-bay, does that sound reasonable? It would mean that instead of me taking the string, you would just initialize the stream on your end and pass it to Maestro.

[ben-bay]

@FrankD412 that sounds reasonable indeed. It hadn't occurred to me to use streams, but this does seem like the correct place to use them.

[FrankD412]

@ben-bay -- Merged. Feel free to pull from develop and use the feature.