On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 8:02 PM, Mike MacCana <mmaccana@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 13:07 -0700, David Lutterkort wrote: > I am pleased to announce a new configuration management project: Augeas, > a low-level configuration API and editing tool. > > Augeas' main goal is to make programmatic changes of configuration data > on Linux/Unix systems simple and safe. The main stumbling stone for this > is that configuration data is stored in numerous files in widely varying > formats. This is both next to impossible to change and is valuable in > many situations. > > The amount of effort spent creating and re-creating tools to parse, edit > and transform a variety of unnecessary, unstructured data formats over the > last 30 years, and to continue doing this for the next 10 years, is less > than that required to: > Then it should have happened.. because we have had several million monkeys doing various things. I have seen multiple attempts at what you outline, but because they are expressing what a person wants something to be you end up with the effects of the tower of Babyl when few people can understand what the other person is saying. > * write an RFC for a standard format You forgot the step: Argue about every 3rd line in the RFC and end up with various versions that all state they meet the RFC but do not interact with each other.. HTML-2.0 wasn't hard to write to.. but no one ever did it the same way. > > * create patches to applications to support that format > > * create an editor for that format (which handles data - settings, values, > parents and children, rather than presentation related info like lines and > paragraph) > > * package those changes in a distribution > > Using 'widely varying formats' is not 'valuable'. It's an unfortunate > accident that wastes everyone's time with various horrible bandaid > solutions, and occasionally makes destroying user data an 'accepted > limitation' of tools like system-config-named. > -- Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice" _______________________________________________ et-mgmt-tools mailing list et-mgmt-tools@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/et-mgmt-tools
