Yaml Export Bundle Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Data export / interchange feature scope — Whether to offer YAML as an export format alongside JSON/CSV for config snapshots, seed files, content portability, or ops handoff. Informs the format matrix on the roadmap.
• Build vs. buy (and the verdict is build) — This package is glue around symfony/yaml; the underlying capability is ~20 lines with Yaml::dump(). The decision it actually supports is "do not adopt; implement in-house or use the maintained component directly."
• Legacy Symfony2 migration triage — If a portfolio includes an old Symfony 2 app, this is a signal of the class of abandoned bundles that need replacement during a framework upgrade (Symfony 2 is EOL; Laravel is not Symfony).
• Supply-chain / dependency hygiene review — 1 star, 0 dependents, no maintenance signal. Useful as a concrete example in a "dependency acceptance criteria" policy discussion.
• Not a feature enabler for Laravel — This is a Symfony Bundle (DI container + bundle registration). It cannot be dropped into a Laravel app without a compatibility shim, so it should not appear in any Laravel roadmap or sprint plan.

When to Consider This Package

Adopt only if all of the following hold:

• You are on a legacy Symfony 2.x application (not Laravel, not Symfony 4+), already bootstrapping bundles, and need YAML serialization within that container.
• The payloads are simple, flat, trusted internal data — no user-supplied structures, no complex object graphs with custom normalizers.
• You accept that you will vendor/fork and own the code, because the upstream is effectively unmaintained.
• There is a hard deadline rationale for not writing the ~20-line serializer yourself.

Look elsewhere (strongly) when:

• You are on Laravel, Lumen, or any non-Symfony framework — the bundle contract is incompatible; use illuminate/support + symfony/yaml directly.
• You are on PHP 8+ / Laravel 9–11 — the bundle's era predates these runtimes; compatibility is unverified.
• You need maintained code, security review, or community support — zero dependents means zero real-world validation.
• The use case is user-facing file download/upload — YAML's object-instantiation and anchor/alias behavior makes it a poor choice for untrusted input; prefer JSON.
• You need performance at scale or streaming exports — a thin dumper is not a bulk export engine.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

Executive summary: This package is a small, single-maintainer Symfony 2 utility for writing YAML files. It has effectively no adoption (1 star, 0 dependents) and does not work with our Laravel stack. Recommendation: do not adopt. The capability it provides — serializing data to YAML — is already available from the well-maintained symfony/yaml component with roughly a day of engineering effort. Investing in this dependency would import maintenance and security risk for a feature we can build in-house, and it is not compatible with our framework or PHP version.

For engineering: Treat this as a reference implementation, not a dependency. The bundle is a thin wrapper over Symfony\Component\Yaml\Yaml::dump(); if we need YAML output, we add symfony/yaml (Laravel-friendly, actively maintained) and write a small exporter service with tests. If we ever touch a legacy Symfony 2 codebase, this is on the list of bundles to replace during the upgrade. Budget: negligible — this is a spike, not a project.

Decision requested: None. Close the evaluation; record the outcome in the dependency register so it isn't re-evaluated.