Re: netcfg

[Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>]

David Whedon wrote:
> I'm starting to look at network configuration.  I'm using dbootstrap/netconfig.c
> as a guide, debconf'ing the messages to start.

I hope you're not actually copying the code <twitch>, just the flow.

I have a little debconf C client library that makes it fairly painless
to telk to debconf from C, you can use things like this:

debconf_command("TITLE", "This is my little peice of debian-installer", NULL);
debconf_command("INPUT", "medium", "foo/bar", NULL);
debconf_command("GO", NULL);
debconf_command("GET", "foo/bar", NULL);
if (strcmp(debconf_ret, "true") == 0) {
	/* yes, do foo/bar */
}

debconf.{c,h} are currently scattered accross the d-i tree; I intend to
move them into a library that we can link to (shared/static I dunno) soon,
as the current situation is ridiculous.

> I figure this is a good place
> to start.  Other than autodetection and giving the user the option of answering
> fewer questions, is there anything new people are looking for in the network
> setup?  Anything from the current installer that was a problem in the past?

It's always seemed pretty well done to me. I like how it calculates the
third value from the first two. Anyone who understands networking or has
the appropriate numbers on paper can use it pretty well.

We might want to toss in a dotted-quad data type into cdebconf (and
perhaps debconf itself too) to facilitate entering IPs, I don't really
know.

> In any case, I'm sort of claiming the network setup,

Great. It definitly needs to be done soon.

Are you going to do just the manual setup, leave dhcp for later? They
should be seperate packages unless they wind up sharing tons of code and
being rather small.

-- 
see shy jo