[Netconf-devel] Re: Please subscribe to netconf-devel

[Thomas Hood]

On Thu, 2005-04-28 at 14:51 +0100, Simon Kelley wrote:
> If I get time this weekend, I plan to look and netconf 0.5 and make some 
> proposals for how to do it.


You can regard netconf as a mostly blank slate.  What I have implemented
so far is just ifupdown in daemon form, written in Python.  This is a
nice thing to start with because it can be installed on our systems and
used right away, which we hack on it.  However, netconf should become
smarter than ifupdown in the future and this will probably require a
different design.  I expect that the new system will grow up alongside
the existing code so that the latter becomes merely a
backward-compatibility face on the new netconf brain.

I would happy if you would take responsibility for adding "native" DHCP
support.  Obviously we should start with diamond.  Later we can consider
adding D-BUS interfaces to some (or all) of the other DHCP clients in
Debian.

Another task is pppd integration.  In netconf 0.5 I use the code from
the experimental edition of ifupdown to interface with pppd; hence, the
interface is better than unstable ifupdown's.  However, there is more to
be desired.  Netconfd needs to know when the PPP connection is broken,
needs to be able to tell pppd either to retry the connection or else to
quit and needs to know the results.

Examples of other tasks:
* Implement the resolvconf API
* Subscribe to whatever relevant information HAL has to provide

-- 
Thomas Hood <jdthood@yahoo.co.uk>