[augeas-devel] Who should ship lenses?

[Francis Giraldeau]

I think I remember one of the long term goal would be to let upstream
projects appropriate their own lenses, and remove them from the augeas
repository. There are pros and cons to this strategy:

Pros:
  * Lens should better match the upstream conf in case of a syntax
    change
  * More distributed model, better scalability (crowd-sourcing)

Cons:
  * Installing the related software would be required to edit it's file
    syntax (ex: editing files in a chroot without augeas in that chroot)
  * Who should own general lenses, like ini or shell lenses?
  * Upstream may not be interested at all to manage lenses, lenses will
    become spread in the universe
  * Il will be harder to get uniform lenses and tree structures
    conventions
  * Upstream may not implements unit tests in their build systems for
    the lens, which would require augeas

IMHO, I think the way it's done right now, keeping lenses in a central
repository, is the way to go. We can find other projects that works this
way, like vim, where most syntax highlighting belongs to the vim
package, not the upstream one, excepted for few.

$ dpkg -S /usr/share/vim/vim72/syntax/sshdconfig.vim 
vim-runtime: /usr/share/vim/vim72/syntax/sshdconfig.vim

In this example, the ssh server package doesn't need to be installed to
get syntax highlighting for sshd config files. That said, there are few
packages that provide their own vim syntax files.

Any thought on this?

Cheer,

Francis