netconf and upstart

[martin f krafft]

also sprach Thomas Hood <jdthood at gmail.com> [2007.05.09.2014 +0200]:
> I see that Petter Reinholdtsen is now co-maintainer of ifupdown so
> there's a good chance of getting the necessary cooperation from that
> direction.

Definitely. And even AJ will cooperate.

> I just paged through your presentation.  Nice!

Thanks.

> A new network configurer should be properly integrated with
> upstart.

Sure, but it should not depend on it. Do you agree?

> I suspect, however, that a higher level language is needed to
> allow the administrator to express his network configuration
> preferences succinctly.  (Higher than upstart's configuration
> files, I mean.  It should also be better designed than
> /e/n/i-ish.)  Chris Hanson once started defining such a language
> but I don't know how far he got.   If the language describes end
> states then the configurer should be smart enough to know how to
> get the system into that state, or as close to it as possible
> given the constraints of the situation.

I would be very interested to see Chris' work.

I've spent most of yesterday afternoon thinking about the issue and
netconfd itself is going to be rather trivial (email forthcoming,
but probably not today).

The real issue is going to be the design of the configuration file.
netconfd will have to be able to read /e/n/i files, but for advanced
configuration, we might need a new file format.

Just a quick note about /e/n/i though:

> Or should we have a bunch of plugins, each with its own
> configuration mechanism that is suited to its domain? That has the
> benefit of each component doing one thing.

/e/n/i does this extremely well with the way it exports statements
to the environment. It's a bit hackish and there are no syntax
checks, but we must aim for this flexibility, no less.

-- 
 .''`.   martin f. krafft <madduck at debian.org>
: :'  :  proud Debian developer, author, administrator, and user
`. `'`   http://people.debian.org/~madduck - http://debiansystem.info
  `-  Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems
 
the english take english for granted.
but if we explore its paradoxes,
we find that quicksand can work slowly.
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