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-Introduction
-------------
-
- Augeas is a library and command line tool that focuses on the most basic
- problem in handling Linux configurations programmatically: editing actual
- configuration files in a controlled manner.
-
- To that end, Augeas exposes a tree of all configuration settings (well,
- all the ones it knows about) and a simple local API for manipulating the
- tree. Augeas then modifies underlying configuration files according to
- the changes that have been made to the tree; it does as little modeling
- of configurations as possible, and focuses exclusivley on transforming
- the tree-oriented syntax of its public API to the myriad syntaxes of
- individual configuration files.
-
- This focus on editing sets Augeas apart from any other configuration tool
- I know of. Hopefully, Augeas will form a more solid foundation on which
- these tools can be built; with a clean, simple API these tools should
- be able to focus more on their core concerns and less on the mechanics
- of running sed, grep, awk, etc. to tweak a config file.
-
- If all you need is a tool to edit configuration files, you only need to
- concern yourself with the handful of public API calls that Augeas exposes
- (or their equivalent language bindings). However, to teach Augeas about a
- new file format, you need to describe that file format in Augeas's domain
- specific language (a very small subset of ML) Documentation for that
- language can be found on the Augeas website at http://augeas.net/ If you
- do that, please contribute the description if at all possible, or include
- it in the distribution of your software - all you need to do for that is
- add a couple of text files, there is no need to change existing
- code. Ultimately, Augeas should describe all config files commonly found
- on a Linux system.
-
-Non-goals
----------
-
- Augeas is as much defined by the things it does _not_ try to accomplish
- as by its goals:
-
- * No abstraction from native config format, i.e. the organization of
- the tree mirrors closely how the native config files are organized
- * No cross-platform abstraction - what is logically the same value may
- live in different places in the tree on different
- distributions. Dealing with that should be left to a higher-level
- tool
- * No remote management support. Augeas is a local API, other ways of
- access to Augeas should be built on top of it
- * No (or very little) modelling. Augeas is focused on syntax
- transformation, not on any higher-level understanding of
- configuration.
-
- The above non-goals are of course important concerns in
- practice. Historically though, too many config mgmt projects have failed
- because they set their sights too high and tried to address syntax
- transformation, modelling, remote support, and scalable management all in
- one. That leads to a lack of focus, and to addressing each of those goals
- unsatisfactorily.
-
-Building
---------
-
- These instructions apply to building a released tarball. If you want to
- build from a git checkout, see the file HACKING.
-
- See the generic instructions in INSTALL. Generally,
- ./configure
- make && make install
- should be all that is needed.
-
- You need to have readline-devel installed. On systems that support
- SELinux, you should also install libselinux-devel.
-
-Documentation
--------------
-
-Documentation can be found on Augeas' website http://augeas.net/ The site
-also contains information on how to get in touch, what you can do to help
-etc.
projects / platform / upstream / augeas.git / blobdiff