[Soc-coordination] Report 5 - Improve Debian-Installer network setup

[Sorina - Gabriela Sandu]

Hello!


This is my fifth (well, in fact fourth since there was no report
number 4) report for Improving Network Configurations on Debian
Installer.


What I’ve done during this period:

* DebConf - merging show essid

	During DebConf, we merged the show_essid branch, you can see the
commit here [1]. Did some more testing on it in that period, fixed
some minor issues and now it’s done.


* Testing, #607766 [2]
	
	D-I fails to configure WEP wireless network without DHCP, however it
doesn’t actually fail if it isn’t tried first. If the network is
configured without DHCP from the beginning, the configuration
succeeds.

Did quite some testing on this one, added extra logging in order to
debug (repo on github [3]), but I didn’t manage to solve it yet, will
do some more research.


* Research (auto detect security type)

	Also spent some time trying to figure out what iwlib offers
concerning scanning, especially if the security type for a network is
also stored in the scanning results. Still not sure if it is so, and
the alternatives are either to rewrite the whole scanning, or to use
what iwlist offers. For the latter, the problem would be that the
results aren’t actually stored, they are just printed, and parsing
them only to get one field out is not good at all.


* Coding style fixes

	Netcfg is not very consistent when it comes to coding style rules and
I think this is a matter that should get some attention. I did some
minor fixes in the past and I’m still working on that, on a separate
branch [4]. Unfortunately, this also brings some problems which I did
not initially thought of (see discussion on the list) so we’ll see
what we can do.



How is it going, according to the initial timeline, what is to be expected:

* Admissibly, I did not do a very good estimation in the beginning so
according to initial timeline, I’m behind schedule.

* We decided on shorter period tasks (usually weekly), rather than
follow the project proposal strictly.

* I’m not sure if I will be able to finish everything that is listed
in the proposal until the end of August, however improvements were
made.

* Very important, at least from my point of view, is that I really
learned a lot during this summer.


[1] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=d-i/netcfg.git;a=commit;h=76d4abc5a1d4882d3377db67432e6beac466b74d
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=607766
[3] https://github.com/sorinasandu/Debian_Netcfg/tree/local_testing
[4] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=d-i/netcfg.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/people/sorina/coding_style


Thanks,
Sorina