Re: ifupdown2: debconf followup
On Mon, Aug 1, 2016 at 12:00 AM, Guus Sliepen <guus@debian.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 31, 2016 at 06:58:20PM -0700, Roopa Prabhu wrote:
>
>> And, we will be very happy to work towards making ifupdown2
>> the default in Debian. If there are ways to make that happen, please let us know.
>
> First, try to make it compatible with 99% of the non-trivial
> ifupdown configurations.
agree 100%
> Why? First, everyone with a trivial network
> configuration (like auto eth0; iface eth0 inet dhcp) will not care
> about what network configuration tool brings up their network. The
> people have a more complex setup will care, and if you make it hard for
> them to move to ifupdown2, I think they'll rather stick with ifupdown.
> You either have to be able to parse ifupdown's /etc/network/interfaces
> or have a way to convert it to whatever new format ifupdown2 requires.
sure. We are backward compatible with ifupdown's interfaces file.
There are some limitations in areas of different address families other than
inet and inet6, but they can be fixed if found important. Most other
configuration
should work. We started with supporting complex network
configurations that were already deployed with ifupdown. And over the
years we have
added new styles and new formats to just make it easier to the user (while
trying to maintain backward compatibility).
>
> I see one big drawback of ifupdown2, and that is that it's written in
> Python. Nothing wrong with that language, but it means it pulls in
> dependencies which a minimal install currently doesn't require, which is
> not so nice for people running small VMs or embedded devices.
sure, this has been raised before. And we have been looking at a possibility
of shipping it as a self contained executable. perhaps by compiling
them into .pyc.
And, from my lessons learnt, a scripting language
is much more easier and extensible for network configurations.
We re-purpose and re-use a lot of already available components which would
not have been possible if we re-wrote it in C.
>
> If ifupdown2 is meant as a drop-in replacement for ifupdown, just fixing
> some bugs or adding a few missing features of ifupdown, I'd rather see
> those issues addressed in ifupdown. But of course, as one of the
> maintainers of ifupdown I'm quite biased :)
sure, we all are :).
For the complex network configurations that we support, it will
be difficult to fix ifupdown.
>
>> I also heard about some existing mailing list or discussions around solving ifupdown
>> problems. We would like to be part of those discussions to see
>> if ifupdown2 fits there.
>
> I don't know of such a mailing list... but there's always the BTS.
>
ok, thanks Guus
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