I mean, the problem I want to solve is real. Configuring containerized applications is always annoying. Currently I either end up baking the configuration into the image, or using a pre-script to convert environment variables into the configuration I actually need before the app starts. Usually via bash scripts... (Or I have to decipher which method the official image uses. If they have one.)

My idea was to just have a little rust tool in my containers that would take the contents of environment variables and turn them into whatever format (toml, yaml, ini, etc.) the app needs. The problem was how do I represent all the different kinds of values you can have in a language? Lists, key/value lists, associative arrays, maps, etc...

Figuring out how to do that, well, isn't that just yet another configuration language?

And that is why I'm posting this question. Has any real effort ever been put into standardizing configuration languages/syntaxes?

If so, why'd they fail? If not, why not?