[augeas-devel] Re: New example at creating a lens

[Dominique Dumont]

Free Ekanayaka <free at 64studio.com> writes:

> The whole point of the policy is to support smooth upgrades of
> configuration files which haven't been touched directly by the system
> administrators. So letting other packages modify a configuration file
> via augeas would probably imply that in case of changes in the format
> of that configuration file, the maintainer of the package providing
> the file should ensure a smooth migration from the previous one to the
> new, including possible modifications performed by other packages (and
> that's why there very few packages providing scripts to modify their
> configuration files).
>
> However this a general problem, non strictly augeas-related, and
> actually augeas would provide a good base to tackle it. So all in all
> I'm for pushing the idea to debian-devel.

I'm already working on configuration upgrade where user (or other
package) customisations are smoothly merged with new informations from
packager (or upstream).

Unfortunately, I don't think that Augeas lenses will have enough
knowledge of the configuration semantics for this task. So I'm using
Config::Model for this task (which may use Augeas to preserve the
original structure and comments of the configuration file)

For more information, see this page on Debian wiki:
http://wiki.debian.org/PackageConfigUpgrade

(Note that the ideas can also be applied to rpm)

I've discussed this idea on debian-perl list. Jonas Smedeggard (of
Debian-blends) is really interested in the idea. I've yet to push this
idea on debian-devel. (I've been a bit busy mentoring for GSoC :-p )

All the best

-- 
Dominique Dumont 
"Delivering successful solutions requires giving people what they
need, not what they want." Kurt Bittner

irc:
  domidumont at irc.freenode.net
  ddumont at irc.debian.org