[et-mgmt-tools] ANNOUNCE: Augeas - a configuration API

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 8:02 PM, Mike MacCana <mmaccana at au1.ibm.com> wrote:
>
>  On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 13:07 -0700, David Lutterkort wrote:
>  I am pleased to announce a new configuration management project: Augeas,
> a low-level configuration API and editing tool.
>
> Augeas' main goal is to make programmatic changes of configuration data
> on Linux/Unix systems simple and safe. The main stumbling stone for this
> is that configuration data is stored in numerous files in widely varying
> formats. This is both next to impossible to change and is valuable in
> many situations.
>
>  The amount of effort spent creating and re-creating tools to parse, edit
> and transform a variety of unnecessary, unstructured data formats over the
> last 30 years, and to continue doing this for the next 10 years, is less
> than that required to:
>

Then it should have happened.. because we have had several million
monkeys doing various things. I have seen multiple attempts at what
you outline, but because they are expressing what a person wants
something to be you end up with the effects of the tower of Babyl when
few people can understand what the other person is saying.


>  * write an RFC for a standard format

You forgot the step: Argue about every 3rd line in the RFC and end up
with various versions that all state they meet the RFC but do not
interact with each other.. HTML-2.0 wasn't hard to write to.. but no
one ever did it the same way.

>
>  * create patches to applications to support that format
>
>  * create an editor for that format (which handles data - settings, values,
> parents and children, rather than presentation related info like lines and
> paragraph)
>
>  * package those changes in a distribution
>
>  Using 'widely varying formats' is not 'valuable'. It's an unfortunate
> accident that wastes everyone's time with various horrible bandaid
> solutions, and occasionally makes destroying user data an 'accepted
> limitation' of tools like system-config-named.
>



-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"