augeas - reading/modifying/writing system configuration files

[David Lutterkort]

On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 15:08 +0200, Adam Tkac wrote:
> In my opinion we need one tool which will load plugins and
> configuration files should be modified through them.

That's kinda where I started from (with "plugin" meaning fairly
arbitrary code that gets loaded and executed) Since I wanted Augeas to
be language neutral (fancy way of saying "written in C"), that would
mean plugins written in C - and everybody loves writing text processing
code in C :( 

Two big goals for Augeas for me are 
     1. has to be useful without any support from upstream (i.e., no "it
        will work great if project X takes our patches") 
     2. describing a new config file format should be reasonably easy

The second one eventually got me to implement a domain-specific language
for file format descriptions. The description for /etc/hosts is at [1],
and a more detailed explanation of what is happening is at [2].

So, the "plugin" that needs to be shipped to enable Augeas to process
some config file X is a text file; right now, they are all shipped as
part of Augeas, but eventually, I'd hope that they can be maintained
closer to the source.

David

[1]
http://hg.et.redhat.com/misc/augeas?f=58bdfbc2e031;file=lenses/hosts.aug

[2] http://augeas.net/docs/writing-schemas.html