[augeas-devel] Re: Reformat function

[Kjetil Torgrim Homme]

David Lutterkort <dlutter at redhat.com> writes:
> Yes, as I understand what Raphael was asking for, quotient
> lenses/canonizers would be the right answer. The goal would be, e.g. to
> make sure that the white space between the IP address and the canonical
> hosts name in /etc/hosts is always a single space (or a tab or ...)

indeed, but I think we want (most) comments to stay around.  adding a
new primitive which is synonomous with "del" except when reformatting
might do the trick.

> A similar request which I think is a little harder to accomplish is
> to make sure the entries in /etc/fstab line up, i.e. have the second
> column in /etc/fstab start in column 24 on all lines. For that, I am
> not even sure how you would achieve that since you'd need to know
> where on the line you are.

it might be best to make it a completely separate language if you want
this kind of control, but a simple printf directive associated with
each node might help.  you won't get the minimal spacing, but you
could say "%-20s" to pad it to at least 20 characters.
-- 
regards,
Kjetil T.