Request for comment: a new software to manage linux networking features

[martin f krafft]

also sprach Michael Biebl <mbiebl at gmail.com> [2008.02.20.1746 +0100]:
> Could you elaborate a bit on what you mean by stateless. Even
> after watching your LCA presentation, it's not really clear to me.

netconf is declarative in that it determines the desired state of
the system, then looks at the actual system, computes the "diff" and
"applies" it, just like an administrator would configure the system
— the admin never fully unconfigures an interface and then
configures it from scratch, but rather makes only the changes
necessary.

netconf won't be entirely stateless, that's impossible, I think.

So it will keep some state, for instance, it remembers that an
interface has been configured with DHCP, so that it can deconfigure
it. It does not care about an interface being up or down though,
like ifupdown would. So if you ifup eth0 and it determines that it
was previously configured with DHCP and is now supposed to be
configured statically, it first cleans up the DHCP stuff and then
configures the interface statically. If there is nothing to clean
up, netconf just goes on and does not fail.

I guess the important point is that I am trying very hard to keep
the state to the absolute minimum. The reason is that internal state
and real world *will* diverge, and rather than identifying such
a divergance and then reacting appropriately, I'd much rather just
use the "external"/real state instead.

Does this answer your question?

-- 
martin | http://madduck.net/ | http://two.sentenc.es/
 
"the only difference between the saint and the sinner
 is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future."
                                                        -- oscar wilde
 
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