Gave a FOSDEM talk on Augeas

Augeas is a configuration editing tool. It parses configuration files in their native formats and transforms them into a tree. Configuration changes are made by manipulating this tree and saving it back into native config files.

One of the many things that makes Linux configuration management the minefield we all love is the lack of a local configuration API. The main culprit for this situation, that configuration data is generally stored in text files in a wide variety of formats, is both an important part of the Linux culture and valuable when humans need to make configuration changes manually. AUGEAS provides a local configuration API that presents configuration data as a tree. The tree is backed directly by the various config files as they exist today; modifications to the tree correspond directly to changes in the underlying files.

AUGEAS takes great care to preserve comments and other formatting details across editing operations. The transformation from files into the tree and back is controlled by a description of the file's format, consisting of regular expressions and instructions on how to map matches into the tree. AUGEAS currently can be used through a command line tool, the C API, and from Ruby, Python, and OCaml. It also comes with descriptions for a good number of common Linux config files that can be edited "out-of-the-box."


https://archive.fosdem.org/2009/schedule/events/fedora_augeas.html