[arch-projects] [initscripts][netcfg] deprecating advanced network functionality from initscripts

[Tom Gundersen]

On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 8:43 PM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
> I do- making a system unbootable without a config change is never a
> good idea. My hope with selection number 2 was that no one using a
> "normal" config would have to change anything, e.g. those using
> headless systems would not have to tweak any dials.

This is a good point (which I should have elaborated on). The problem
is that there is currently no limit to what weird things people might
use the network script to do, so it is very hard to keep 100%
backwards compatibility (unless we opt for not changing anything at
all).

What I had in mind was to map the old configuration to the new one in
such a way that those who had a vanilla setup before would not notice
anything. However, those who set up weird stuff would have to change
their config.

Note that we cannot keep 100% backwards compatibility if we want to
move to iproute2  (which I really think we should as net-tools has
been dead for more than 10 years), so something would have to break
(Dave, correct me if I'm wrong here...).

So the question is: is it worth trying to keep some network
functionality in initscripts, taking into account that we cannot be
100% backwards compatible? Alternatively, is backwards compatibility
so important that we should not change it at all?

-t