netcfg and dhcp
Hi David, I have taken a look at the current netcfg, and I am wondering
what your plans are for dhcp. It looks like you fully support dhcp, via
calling a dhcp client and setting up other things. Problem is, this is
somewhat counter to the debian-installer design.
My original idea was that tools to configure the network would all
provide some virtual package like "configured-network". When something
needs a network, the main menu would check to see what provided that
package. If it was one package, it wouodl make sure it was set up. If
there was more than one, it would present a list of the available
methods of configuring the network, and use whichever one the user
picked. (Code for this is planned, it's not in main-menu yet.) Similar
things would be done for lilo/grub set up and so on. It's useful because
if someone wants to contribute another way of configuring the network
(setting up a ppp connection, say), they only have to write a udeb,
which drops in and works.
But since netcfg handles both manual and dhcp network configuration,
it's sort of sidestepped this plan. This has, I supposes, plusses and
minues.
Plusses:
* Maybe it was easier to do.
* It might be a bit smaller if both manual and dhcp options are needed
to combine them into one binary, especially if you ended up sharing
code.
Minuses:
* If we want to make a boot floppy that only does dhcp, or one that only
does a manual configuration, that isn't possible.
* That could result in a small space waste in fact.
* And it means the user will always be prompted about whether they
want to use dhcp.
* The package really needs to depend on a dhcp client, but if it does
we'll have no option to not include that dhcp client in the d-i base
system.
* If someone writes another network configurator, for ppp or whatever,
then the selection between it and netcfg still needs to be done.
How hard wouyld it be to break netcfg in to, so it consists of a manual
and a dhcp network configurator?
--
see shy jo
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