When changing configs, the unit of change is often less than a file.
Using diff/patch and things like Ansible's lineinfile can apply the change, but the result is not guaranteed to be semantically or even syntactically valid.
With Augeas, it is going to be valid.
Also the big promise with a tool like this is that changes are bidirectional.
See the Boomerang project for more on this. http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~harmony/
My own experience with Augeas has been mixed.
It's quite prickly and uninformative in use and probably unintuitive to many. For example augtool by default handles the entire tree of config files. So if you just want to change maybe /etc/fstab you might encounter errors on files that you don't care about. Also I've often found that the lenses aren't quite complete, at least in standard distributions. For instance, the Centos6 Augeas's (version 1.0.0) xml lens didn't handle PCDATA or the DOCTYPE declaration.
Luckily its improving and more examples are becoming available.
Using diff/patch and things like Ansible's lineinfile can apply the change, but the result is not guaranteed to be semantically or even syntactically valid.
With Augeas, it is going to be valid.
Also the big promise with a tool like this is that changes are bidirectional. See the Boomerang project for more on this. http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~harmony/
My own experience with Augeas has been mixed. It's quite prickly and uninformative in use and probably unintuitive to many. For example augtool by default handles the entire tree of config files. So if you just want to change maybe /etc/fstab you might encounter errors on files that you don't care about. Also I've often found that the lenses aren't quite complete, at least in standard distributions. For instance, the Centos6 Augeas's (version 1.0.0) xml lens didn't handle PCDATA or the DOCTYPE declaration.
Luckily its improving and more examples are becoming available.