On Fri, 2008-04-18 at 17:17 +0000, David Lutterkort wrote: > On Fri, 2008-04-18 at 12:02 +1000, Mike MacCana wrote: > > * create an editor for that format (which handles data - settings, > > values, parents and children, rather than presentation related info > > like lines and paragraph) > > At its heart, Augeas is a tool to make writing such editors easy, easier > than starting from scratch for every format. Of course, there's also > benefit for users if they can edit many config files with the same tool > instead of having a separate tool for each config file. Excellent. Is there a possibility that Augeas could encourage, or actively patch, applications to read their configuration directly from Augeas format files? Some of the responses to me original comment agreed that a standardized config file format was incredibly useful, but hard to achieve. Distros have some real power here, and Red Hat has used this power for good in the past: * Red Hat patched KDE to support a bunch of freedesktop.org specifications (for example, notification area support) back in the day, and while a few people got their nose out of joint, the changes were ultimately accepted into upstream KDE. Red Hat just pushed for the standard first. * Ditto ISO C - some apps had to be changed for Red Hat's more standards compliant GCC 2.96, but all those apps - including the Linux kernel and mplayer - required patching to be compilable on GCC 3 anyway, and after some grumbling, the third party apps were fixed. Red Hat just pushed for the standard first. A distribution has never encouraged apps to standardize on a config file format. There's a real opportunity here. Mike > > > Using 'widely varying formats' is not 'valuable'. > > I was a little oblique .. I meant 'that config data is stored in text > files is valuable', mostly to contrast that with some other approaches > that have been proposed in the past. OK, and agreed. > > It's an unfortunate accident that wastes everyone's time with various > > horrible bandaid solutions > > I think we're all in agreement that the situation is far from the best > imaginable. That's why I chose "Augeas"[1] as the name for this ;) > > David > > [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augeas > > "In Greek mythology, Augeas ... was King of Elis ... He is best known for his > stables, which housed the single greatest number of cattle in the country and > had never been cleaned" > > _______________________________________________ > et-mgmt-tools mailing list > et-mgmt-tools@xxxxxxxxxx > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/et-mgmt-tools Cheers, Mike ________________________________________________ Mike MacCana Technical Specialist Linux Services IBM Global Services Level 14, 60 City Rd Southgate Vic 3000 Phone: +61-3-8656-2138 Fax: +61-4-8656-2423 Email: mmaccana@xxxxxxxxxxx _______________________________________________ et-mgmt-tools mailing list et-mgmt-tools@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/et-mgmt-tools
