Yes it could, but the result would be quite different.

inifile is extremely well tuned to parsing and writing inifiles. It will put the values into the exact places you, as human operator, would look for them.

I don't mean in any way to undermine augeas, it's a great tool. However, it's a general purpose tool, and for inifiles there are better ways of doing it.

Except when you have an array setting like php.ini's `extension` ;)