[augeas-devel] Re: Enhanced inittab lens

[Kjetil Torgrim Homme]

Matthew Palmer <matt at anchor.net.au> writes:

> On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 09:49:17PM -0700, David Lutterkort wrote:
>> So, if I break your uses of Augeas with a similar cleanup in
>> another lens, you promise not to compain (too much) ?
>
> I'll likely get a bit annoyed that it wasn't done right in the first
> place (which is, let's face it, pretty much my natural state of
> being), and if it's not an improvement there'll almost certainly be
> a grumble generated, but I'll live with an incompatible improvement.

Augeas hasn't reached 1.0 yet, and I think it goes with the territory
that breakage can occur.  as you mentioned below, plugging in an old
copy of the lens if needed is quite easy for the administrator.
changes to the C code (e.g, changing the lens parser or the XPath
evalutation) needs more consideration, but even there I urge you to Do
The Right Thing while you still can (not that I have any specific
changes in mind).

>> Lens versioning though seems like it would get very messy over time
>> - and if we break backwards compatibility to get things right, what
>> we might mstly need is a way to clearly advertise breakage.

a way to declare the version as a simple number in the lens is all
that's needed, and a way to check that version.  put it in the tree,
e.g., /augeas/load/Inittab/version.  the number should be like the ABI
versions of libc, not a release number.  trying to add more dimensions
than a single number won't be very useful, I think.

-- 
Kjetil T. Homme
Redpill Linpro AS - Changing the game