Augeas - Red Hat road map / strategy
I see that Augeas didn't get promoted from the 'Optional' repository in RHEL 7, which begs the question... what are the plans for Augeas from a Red Hat perspective?
Augeas is referenced regularly in Puppet configuration so I am guessing Augeas may be leveraged in the upcoming Satellite 6 release for configuration management.. but I am interested to know if Red Hat have wider plans for Augeas as it wears the Red Hat 'Emerging Technology' badge.
Looking at the stock lenses, many have been developed by Red Hat employees.. is there a vision (pun might have been intended) to use Augeas as a configuration shim for other Red Hat created components (ie. UI / system-config-*) ?
Any insight appreciated!
Responses
Red Hat
Community Member
99 points
Hi there,
Thanks for the questions. I'm the maintainer of Augeas in RHEL, so hopefully I can give you my perspective on the project.
The first thing to say is that the way Augeas is shipped in RHEL repos is simply down to how the package content is laid out. The 'augeas' RPM only contains the CLI so is shipped in Optional because there's no direct dependency for the CLI in the base OS... however, the 'augeas-libs' package is the heart of Augeas, as it provides the C library and lenses/modules to parse over a hundred config file formats. This is in RHEL's base channel because it's used by a number of other packages, notably libguestfs and our P2V/V2V tools (key RHEL virtualisation features).
I'd like to see more projects using Augeas, but frankly, there haven't been lots so far. Puppet has been the best thing to happen to the project (and sometimes worst!), but it has inspired some new projects in the same space, such as augeasfacter (a Facter extension using Augeas to retrieve values from files) and augeasproviders (lots of new types/providers to Puppet).
As you know, and as a side note, Red Hat Satellite 6 (the team I work on) will provide Puppet as the configuration management tool, so if you're looking for a top-to-bottom supported stack from Red Hat containing Augeas, it's planned to be released this year.
Probably the best way to begin expanding Augeas' use is in the configuration management space, by improving integration with other tools such as Salt, Ansible and Chef. Higher level abstractions such as augeasproviders are a better way to use the library in these types of tools, and I'd love to see equivalents or even code sharing.
I've not heard of system-config-* tools wanting to use it before, but it's certainly a possibility. One of the system tools that already uses it to great effect is 'netcf', an abstraction layer used by libvirt for managing network interface configuration across multiple operating systems with different lenses.
The lenses have certainly come from many Red Hatters, but also a huge number of contributions from people using them and finding areas lacking. With your RHEL subscription, you can also file RFEs via Red Hat Support if there's a config file format you'd like to see added. Both RHEL 6 and 7 get plenty of bug fixes throughout their lifetime for lenses, so do also file bugs with us when you find them.
Cheers,
Dominic
Hi, hoping this is the right place:
I am trying to use the puppet augeas plugin to add a couple of extra lines to sssd.conf (for example setting the default username format) in our ipa environment - the problem is, it seems to create the entries without any spaces either side of the = sign. This means sssd simply ignores those settings. Is there a problem with the default lens for sssd.conf in augeas/puppet?
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