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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.

License

-------

Augeas is released under the [Lesser General Public License, Version 2.1](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.html)

See the file COPYING for details.