On Mon, 2004-08-23 at 07:46 -0400, Alan Cox wrote: > On Sun, Aug 22, 2004 at 09:37:56PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote: > > BTW, when using NetworkManager for desktops, do we really need network- > > scripts and sysconfig/networking at all? > > Define "desktop". If you mean "dhcp managed disposable splat" then probably > not, but desktop also covers a large multitude of other things including > secure IPsec networks, static addressing, cable modems, ppp, ... I'm not trying to say "there are no config files," rather "maybe there's no point writing one out if it just says BOOTPROTO=dhcp and nothing else, as the ones kudzu made for me all currently do - just leave them blank by default and let NetworkManager decide what to do" > The kernel names interfaces it finds eth0, eth1, ... etc (or ppp0 and so on). > It provides the ability to rename them as you like (so you can rename them > to "ADSL" "DMZ" "DavesRoom" and so on...). The current process is meant to be > > Driver gets loaded > We peer at the MAC > We decide what eth* device it was before from the MAC (optional) > We rename it > We run the scripts What's the story on this "wifi0" "sit0" stuff, btw? > > > One policy we might try to get closer to: clearly split autogenerated > > information from manually-edited information, and machine-readable > > information from human-only information such as scripts. > > The how does the user edit it - and don't say "with the config tools" they > are not accessible or complete enough. You edit it by changing the manually-edited information. It's the same idea as the way many config files have a "<include>site- local.conf</include>" type of statement, where you are supposed to modify site-local.conf instead of the stock file. In an ideal system, you might have a file (probably in /var) that defines the autoprobe results; you have a config file (in /etc) that is fully machine-readable and defines how to use and/or massage/override the autoprobe results; from the config file, you point to script hooks called at well-defined times. The config file should not itself be a script, because that is not machine-editable. I don't think we're that far from this now. hwconf is the autoprobe results for example. kudzu seems to also look at the manual-edited files though. I guess what I'm saying is have some default behavior as a function of autoprobe results, and view the manual-edited files as override of the defaults - then machine-writing defaults into the manual-edited files isn't necessary. It's not really a big deal, I'm just wondering how to make things more robust. Havoc