dhclient-script, hooks, and changing the environment

[martin f krafft]

Folks,

having gotten over the rage that caused [0] to be written, I am now
trying to make an informed decision about how netconf should
integrate DHCP hooks. I thus seek your opinion and experience and
would appreciate your help.

dhclient hooks are encouraged by the dhclient-script(8) manpage to
modify the environment and override shell functions to change the
behaviour of dhclient-script. To enable this, dhclient-script
sources them one after the other.

Since netconf isn't written in shell, to support this "feature",
I would have to run each hook from a shell and print, feed back, and
process the environment with the execvp() call. Major hack, major
pain, and I am -><- this close to dumping the "feature".

resolvconf overrides make_resolv_conf(), but resolv.conf will be
handled by dhclient directly anyway, so that very application of
sourcing hooks is being taken care of.

Anything else? Do you know of packages that rely on this
functionality? Do you have scripts of your own which modify the
environment? Would you please be so kind as to explain to me what
they do, and help me figure out whether there isn't a better way for
them?

0. http://madduck.net/blog/2008.08.05:the-dhclient-nightmare/

-- 
 .''`.   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
 
one morning i shot an elephant in my pyjamas.
how he got into my pyjamas i'll never know.
                                                       -- groucho marx
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