[Mageia-dev] Proposal: Deprecate draknetcenter+network init scripts after systemd becomes default.

Tue Aug 23 12:26:25 CEST 2011

'Twas brillig, and Guillaume Rousse at 23/08/11 10:33 did gyre and gimble:
+> On 23/08/2011 10:30, Colin Guthrie wrote:
+>> 'Twas brillig, and Michael scherer at 22/08/11 13:14 did gyre and gimble:
+>>> On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 08:44:01AM -0300, Balcaen John wrote:
+>>>> Le Monday 22 August 2011 12:57:23 Guillaume Rousse a écrit :
+>>>>> On 22/08/2011 11:57, Colin Guthrie wrote:
+>>>>>> I also have it on good authority that many of the features lacking
+>>>>>> in NetworkManager (such as bridging configuration) will be
+>>>>>> available in the not too distant future and many other more
+>>>>>> advanced networking features such as fast-start DHCP,
+>>>>>> per-interface DNS, 4-8's DNS fallback and several other nice
+>>>>>> features will ultimately be possible too.
+>>>>> While I don't care about configuration wizards, I do about
+>>>>> initscripts. How are you supposed to configure a server in some
+>>>>> automated manner without plain-old configuration files ?
+>>>> If i'm not wrong you can still drop plain text files in
+>>>> /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/
+>>>
+>>> Provided you want to do nothing fancy like bridge, vlan and
+>>> others stuff that are used by sysadmins.
+>>
+>> As I said in my initial email, but was not clear. All of these things
+>> will be supported in a much nicer way in the near future.
+
+
+> Well, even if supported, I do feel much more confident in shell scripts
+>
+> I can read, understand and easily fix if needed to fit my own needs,
+> than in a native binary.
+
+This is a endless argument but one which will ultimately not be
+sustainable I fear. I do sympathise, but by the same token, I also want
+a modern, fast and efficient system too, so I'm kinda torn. I understand
+C code pretty well generally and while I can't just "less" the program
+on my machine it's not too hard to get the source code and pick through
+it when I need to (which is very rarely in reality) so I think both my
+need for curiosity is satisfied and while I accept the "on-site
+hackability" does get negatively impacted, the larger number of users
+using a standard system should result in less problems overall and thus
+less need to hack in the first place... this won't always be true, but
+I'm happy with that trade off.
+
+> How would removing initscripts support helps enhancing networkmanager
+> integration ?
+
+Because the current philosophy of the Unix legacy is lots of individual
+utils from various packages cobbled together with some glue shell
+scripting code... and it's dying.
+
+The things that these individual tools implement are a few relatively
+simply commands to the kernel and it doesn't make sense to do all this
+in shell. It makes much more sense to do all these jobs in efficient
+code that runs *quickly* without forking hundreds of times. The code is
+still perfectly visible and easily hackable, but now things are much
+more robust and efficient.
+
+It's also the case that people *talk* about doing stuff lots, but very
+rarely actually *do* it. People have talked about tidying up the init
+system for years, and they've talked about improving the networking
+support for years but these just go in circles and never really result
+in real progress. For the first time in a long time, things are actually
+being *done* about this and in doing so we can take advantage of a lot
+of the modern features of Linux. It's exciting and it means that the
+support in the GUI frontends for network management become much more
+standardised and less varying over different distros. The fact that
+distros all tweak things and do "homebrew" for network management means
+that for tools like network manager to support all distros they have to
+do a whole bunch of weird shit to work on RH vs Mandrvia. vs Suse, vs
+Ubuntu etc. etc. By ripping out the cruft and replacing it with standard
+binaries, you get consistency at the expense of the all the variations
+but IMO this is a good thing - everyone benefits from a larger community
+working on the same thing - more eyes, less bugs, more features.
+
+So, removing the variations in different distros init methods and
+network management tools, is very clearly enabling better network
+manager integration.
+
+Hope that explains it a bit (tho' I'm typing quickly because I'm "at
+work", so sorry if it doesn't read super clearly!)
+
+Col
+
+-- 
+
+Colin Guthrie
+mageia(at)colin.guthr.ie
+http://colin.guthr.ie/
+
+Day Job:
+  Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/]
+Open Source:
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+