[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#699749: Bug#699749: Incompatible change in the ifupdown hooks interface

[Andrew Shadura]

Hello.

On 6 March 2013 13:45, Michael Biebl <biebl at debian.org> wrote:
> A quick grep over all unpacked packages shipping ifupdown hooks show 60
> hook scripts which don't have ADDRFAM set.
> I haven't checked them individually, though.

They usually check for interface name to match "eth*" or something,
which is supposed to work. Somehow it did happen I haven't noticed
avahi-daemon to have this thing, so that's why it's not fixed. Other
packages I expect to work flawlessly.

>> I don't know why these --all calls are a useful thing for ifupdown to do,
>> but I do think it's the responsibility of the avahi package to sensibly
>> ignore values of $ADDRFAM that it doesn't understand.

> What I'm not happy about is, that such a change was made without
> notifiying the affected package maintainers *in advance* with clear
> instructions how to address this. Ideally via the BTS.
> Such documentation and instructions are still missing.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/04/msg00448.html

By the way, quoting myself, “Network Manager already uses similar
approach, so if anything can break, it's been broken for a long time
already.”

> Andrew, care to explain what a package maintainer is supposed to
> consider when shipping such a hook? The existing documentation is rather
> scarce on this topic.

Handle what you can, ignore everything else. Check ADDRFAM, METHOD or
interface name (unreliable a bit) and decide if you need to continue
execution or not. It'd be easier to give recommendations if I knew
what exactly is unclear in the documentation, I've tried to explain
thing to be easily understandable.

-- 
WBR, Andrew