Re: cfengine and config4gnu

[Mark . Burgess]

Peter,

thanks for your E-mail. I must confess that I cannot recall having heard of the 
config4gnu project,
but then I have a short memory for most things! Your project sounds interesting 
and if it is handled
carefully could be integrated with cfengine. However, the idea of maintaining 
various file
formats is not really the "cfengine way", so that on a superficial level at 
least it sounds like
something more traditional than cfengine. 

WHat cfengine could benefit from is a front end that could work as a console 
monitor and perhaps a
helper application for maintaining the config and any template files. At the 
moment it sounds like
a system for only generating template files.

I would suggest learning more about cfengine by browsing the website 
http://www.cfengine.org
and seeing whether you think the methods are compatible. That would be the 
first step to a
collaboration.

Mark


On  4 Nov, p.carsten@arcor.de wrote:
> 
> Hello everybody,
> 
> i am interested to know if you heard of the config4gnu project and if there 
> might be some interest of hooking it nicely together with cfengine.
> 
> So far Config4gnu provides a unified configuration API for all kinds of 
> config files on a single machine. Frontends for WWW, GTK, comand line 
> (skripts) or programms using the config4gnu API directly all see the same 
> "configuration tree". Config4Gnu provides logic/consistency checking, 
> activation of changes, "configuration wizards" and more. But at all times 
> only the config files under /etc are authoritative and are still fully hand 
> editable including the comments.
> 
> The Config4Gnu parsers (backends) understand the syntax based on a 
> config-file definition and dynamicly generates a xml representation of it. If 
> a logic-definition is also available the middlelayer knows wich settings are 
> common with other packages, which help texts are relevant, how to activate 
> changes, etc. and about wizard and test logics.
> 
> The system is designed so that with two config definition files an 
> application is fully supported, providing easy access for all UIs, scripts or 
> programs. In the future these definiton files can be maintained within the 
> different software packages so that its central configuration is instantly 
> availabe upon installation.
> 
> 
> I see this as the future way to handle configuration for free software. It is 
> not limiting the personal choice of configuration file style for a programer, 
> yet he has all the fancy stuff at hands easily. He could even use the 
> Config4Gnu system directliy to parse and generate the configuration files for 
> his application.
> 
> According to the two main developers the system is fully functional and can 
> edit
> many config formats.  It supports samba nearly fully. But it is not ready for 
> public use yet. For example some dependencies need to be cleared.
> 
> Now my question is if there might be some interest in the cfengine community 
> to work together with this.
> 
> Maybe it would be nice to do configuration changes through the config4gnu 
> system on clients or to use cfengine as backend for config4gnu making a whole 
> lot of machines accassible to all frontends
> 
> To find out more about Config4Gnu please visit 
> http://config4gnu.sourceforge.net and look into our mailachives. Unlike the 
> website states there has also been a tarball released.
> 
> -Peter
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Help-cfengine mailing list
> Help-cfengine@gnu.org
> http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-cfengine



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