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

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 01:39:06PM +1000, Mike MacCana wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 21:17 -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> 
> > 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:
> > >
> 
> (create a standard format, proactively patch apps to support a standard
> format, make an editor for that format, and start shipping packages)

Back in the real world people also want to be able to manage existing deployed
production applications today. Even if you convince upstream to adopt your
grand unified configuration scheme, it'll take a seriously long time before
all applications you care about managing are changed & filter down into
real world deployed OS. And then there are all the closed source applications
which you have no control over.

So even if everyone agreed to use a standard configuration format, exceedingly
unlikely, there'd still be a huge set of existing applications to managed
with a tool like Augeas.

Dan.
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