[augeas-devel] Augeas Merging Configuration

[Raphaël Pinson]

Hi,

On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 10:55 AM, Christos Bountalis
<c.bountalis at gmail.com> wrote:
> My name is Christos Bountalis,I just joined this list. I was about to begin
> coding a new tool from scratch for merging configurations files for openSUSE
> as a student project for Google Summer of Code 2011.

Great. Congrats for getting a SoC project.

> Recently, however we
> got a suggestion about Augeas that found very interesting. So instead of
> writing a new application I am thinking of extending Augeas with the ability
> to merge configuration files.

I think that would be very interesting.

>
> If am i not wrong, this feature is not available in Augeas at the moment,
> right?

That is right.

To tell the truth, I'd be very interested in such an algorithm. I've
been writing a patch to export to and from XML in Augeas. The "to"
direction is quite straightforward, but the from direction means
either discrediting the existing tree to use only the one from the
import, or merging the trees. Having a method to merge two Augeas
trees would greatly help me.

That said, I'm not sure if this should belong inside Augeas. David
could probably tell you more about that, but I think it might be
interesting to base your code on the Augeas library and build another
one on top of it, unless accessing the internal API calls makes it
easier (which might very well be the case).

In any case, I think a merging tool based on Augeas would be great!


Cheers,


Raphaël