augeas - reading/modifying/writing system configuration files

[David Malcolm]

On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 09:37 -0700, David Lutterkort wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 11:50 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > If you have an existing already-invented parser for something, what's
> > the benefit?
> 
> Uniformity ... there are lots of parsers for editing config files hidden
> in various tools; they all give you a completely different "API" for
> changing config files. And usually you can't get to them for any other
> purpose than what the tool is written for. 
> 
> Case in point: Webmin has a _ton_ of these config file editors in it.
> Good luck trying to use those, even assuming you are working from a Perl
> script (and better luck keeping that working across Webmin releases)

The other thing that doesn't seem to have been mentioned yet: how well
does augeas preserve whitespace/comments etc when writing changes back
out? (to play well with hand-edited config files)  I got the impression
reading the web site that it does this "for free" once you've written
the input lens.  (how well does it work?)  I suspect that a hand-coded
parser typically won't do as good a job of this.

Hope this helps
Dave