[Ginger-dev-list] about using confparse VS python configparser to parse net scripts

[Daniel Henrique Barboza]

Hi,

I've been discussing this in private with Jayavardhan and I thought it 
would be better to push the discussion to the ML.

Jayavardhan asked me if it was ok to use 
https://code.google.com/p/confparse/ to parse the network scripts. The 
idea is that the default python package, ConfigParser 
(https://docs.python.org/2/library/configparser.html) does not work well 
with files that are section-less, which happens to be the case of Linux 
network scripts.

Checking out confparser I've noticed two downsides:

- license. It uses LGPLv3 while the rest of the plug-ins/WoK uses 
LGPLv2. It is not *that* big of a deal - we would need to move Ginger, 
Kimchi, Wok and the future Ginger-base to LGPL v3 as well - but it is 
extra work.

- support. As far as I've noticed, the project isn't being supported 
anymore. There are 2 open issues in the old repo at code.google.com and 
the latest commit in github is from Feb 22 2013. I am not sure if we can 
rely in this library to release a product.


My suggestion is to use the default python library, ConfigParser, and 
workaround its limitations to read the network files. Here's a solution 
I've found in the web of the section-less config file:


http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2885190/using-pythons-configparser-to-read-a-file-without-section-name


Let me know your comments/thoughts and if you're having problems parsing 
the network scripts and init files.


Daniel