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

[Jayavardhan Katta]

On Monday 19 October 2015 10:12 PM, Daniel Henrique Barboza wrote:
> 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.
We have seen that, confparse is also available at - 
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/confparse/1.0a1 with GNU GPLv2

> - 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 
This workaround is only for read operations. write, update and delete 
operations needs to be taken care which looks complex.
> Let me know your comments/thoughts and if you're having problems 
> parsing the network scripts and init files.
Option1: Use the confparse(https://pypi.python.org/pypi/confparse/1.0a1) 
as library
Option2: Port the source code of confparse to the Ginger/WOKbase
                Advantage of using confparse: taken care exception 
handling, has all required methods like 
read/write/update/delete/keyexists etc..
Option3: Our own parser code
               Parser code attach

We feel Option1 or 2 is better. We have started using Option2 for the 
network use case implementation. Sooner we decide on the options we 
would have less rework. :-)

> Daniel

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