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6 Augeas is a library and command line tool that focuses on the most basic
7 problem in handling Linux configurations programmatically: editing actual
8 configuration files in a controlled manner.
10 To that end, Augeas exposes a tree of all configuration settings (well,
11 all the ones it knows about) and a simple local API for manipulating the
12 tree. Augeas then modifies underlying configuration files according to
13 the changes that have been made to the tree; it does as little modeling
14 of configurations as possible, and focuses exclusivley on transforming
15 the tree-oriented syntax of its public API to the myriad syntaxes of
16 individual configuration files.
18 This focus on editing sets Augeas apart from any other configuration tool
19 I know of. Hopefully, Augeas will form a more solid foundation on which
20 these tools can be built; with a clean, simple API these tools should
21 be able to focus more on their core concerns and less on the mechanics
22 of running sed, grep, awk, etc. to tweak a config file.
24 If all you need is a tool to edit configuration files, you only need to
25 concern yourself with the handful of public API calls that Augeas exposes
26 (or their equivalent language bindings). However, to teach Augeas about a
27 new file format, you need to describe that file format in Augeas's domain
28 specific language (a very small subset of ML) Documentation for that
29 language can be found on the Augeas website at http://augeas.net/ If you
30 do that, please contribute the description if at all possible, or include
31 it in the distribution of your software - all you need to do for that is
32 add a couple of text files, there is no need to change existing
33 code. Ultimately, Augeas should describe all config files commonly found
39 Augeas is as much defined by the things it does _not_ try to accomplish
42 * No abstraction from native config format, i.e. the organization of
43 the tree mirrors closely how the native config files are organized
44 * No cross-platform abstraction - what is logically the same value may
45 live in different places in the tree on different
46 distributions. Dealing with that should be left to a higher-level
48 * No remote management support. Augeas is a local API, other ways of
49 access to Augeas should be built on top of it
50 * No (or very little) modelling. Augeas is focused on syntax
51 transformation, not on any higher-level understanding of
54 The above non-goals are of course important concerns in
55 practice. Historically though, too many config mgmt projects have failed
56 because they set their sights too high and tried to address syntax
57 transformation, modelling, remote support, and scalable management all in
58 one. That leads to a lack of focus, and to addressing each of those goals
64 These instructions apply to building a released tarball. If you want to
65 build from a git checkout, see the file HACKING.
67 See the generic instructions in INSTALL. Generally,
71 should be all that is needed.
73 You need to have readline-devel installed. On systems that support
74 SELinux, you should also install libselinux-devel.
79 Documentation can be found on Augeas' website http://augeas.net/ The site
80 also contains information on how to get in touch, what you can do to help
86 Augeas is released under the [Lesser General Public License, Version 2.1](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.html)
87 See the file COPYING for details.