Are you thinking of Augeas? That was a project inside RH to parse nearly every config found in /etc, and be able to view and modify them all from a standard API.
I wanted to parse INI files a few weeks back and briefly looked at Augeas... the augtool syntax was a little too nonsensical or verbose for me. Felt like I had to be an expert with the entire tool even though all I wanted was 3% of its functionality.
I looked a little harder and then found jc[1] which made parsing the ini file easy, and since I didn't need full CRUD support I threw my hands up and used that instead. I _would_ like to find a fast and easy way to convert json/yaml to simple INI file syntax at the command line, or do idempotent modifications to the INI files without writing a command where 99% of it is describing to jq or awk what an INI file looks like.
It's basically a pluggable lexer, it is stable. And especially new config files have standardized on some variation of INI, Toml or YAML so there's less need for app-specific parsing.
