[arch-dev-public] New wireless and network scripts.

[Aaron Griffin]

On 4/1/07, Thomas Bächler <thomas at archlinux.org> wrote:
> Hi James,
>
> I am not saying I don't appreciate your work, but I am posting here to
> point out a few things I don't like about our old and new network
> scripts (more for general discussion than related to your specific efforts):
>
> A network "profile" is always only one interface. I'd expect a profile
> to be several interfaces that are activated all at once and are sort of
> tied together (I didn't read your latest version yet, did you already
> add such a thing?).
>
> That leads me to the second: While configuration via bash-script is easy
> for the programmer (you can simply parse it via 'source'), it is unsafe
> and becomes rather complicated when features are added. Especially when
> we want more than one interface in a profile, it becomes messy. I would
> suggest a inifile-like configuration style where each section '[foo]'
> marks an interface. This is much more readable to the user and allows
> more flexibility but itis not as easy to work with.
>
> Last but not least, invoking our netcfg tool from a GUI or any other
> external application is not optimal. netcfg is a shell script, but IMO
> should be a library. We could then have proper bindings to C/C++/python
> and so on. Also, when it becomes more complicated, writing bash becomes
> ugly very fast.
>
> I actually started a little C++ implementation of the above ideas, but
> got lost in bison/flex soon (anyone wanna give me a crash course on how
> to do it right? I have a parser that works good enough so I can start
> experimenting, but nothing fool-proof). I may or may not continue this
> work soon. The current state is this: Nothing works, I have many ideas,
> a highly experimental framework and hopefully some free time soon.
>
> Open for discussion :)

I think getting too complex with configuration tools is not the best
idea.  I do, however agree that the profile-to-interface mapping
should be a one-to-many mapping.

Regarding the "using bash is unsafe" thing, you could say that's true
only if this person making it "unsafe" has root access - if it is the
owner, it's their fault if they make something unsafe.  If it is a
third party, you have more problems than just network configuration
being unsafe.

Also, if bash is unsafe, we need to rewrite rc.conf, makepkg, and
probably a hundred other utilities.  Dan and I might be willing to
accept patches for a binary makepkg, so feel free.