[augeas-devel] Similar model based configuration manager

[David Lutterkort]

On Thu, 2008-04-24 at 15:46 +0200, Dominique Dumont wrote:
> David Lutterkort <dlutter at redhat.com> writes:
> > That's probably the biggest difference to Augeas: Augeas provides an
> > API for changing config data; a nice UI on top of that (in the
> > spirit of gconf-editor) would be really nice.  I also don't have a
> > schema for /etc/fstab yet, though it would be very easy to write.
> 
> Hmm, when you take into account all options for fs types, you get
> quite a handfull of them.

It depends on how tight you want to make the model; if you want Augeas
to have a close understanding of which options go with what fs, then
yes, that's a lot more work than just processing the syntax
of /etc/fstab.

> Classifying elements according to their complexity is another matter.

Yeah, that seems pretty difficult.

> The nice thing I noticed about Augeas is that comments are preserved
> in the config file. Nice trick. (I'm thinking about using Augeas to
> read/write sshd_config file ...)

Having the precision to preserve comments and formatting details is one
of the big headaches in Augeas, but I think that's needed to make a
convincing config editing tool; especially, if it should remain possible
to edit those files by other means, too.

I'd appreciate if you gave the way sshd_config is exposed in Augeas a
quick once over (just fire up augtool and do
'print /files/etc/ssh/sshd_config') - I'd be very curious to hear if
that would be good enough for Config::Model. If you want to dig deeper,
the mapping is in lenses/sshd.aug (with tests in
lenses/tests/test_sshd.aug)

> Is Augeaus able to detect wrong keyword entered through Augeas shell ?

Yes (modulo bugs ;) What is considered wrong depends on how the file is
modelled; e.g. whether the corresponding schema description (in a .aug
file) lists all the settings that are valid in sshd_config, or just
recognizes all lines of a certain format.

> To be useful, config::model will need more data that what can be found
> in the lenses (user help, level, permission/skill...)

Yes, that's what I meant with 'additional data keyed off the schema'

David