Re: [gentoo-dev] renaming gentoo-oldnet

[Robin H. Johnson]

I'm replying the start of this thread, rather than picking a single
person to respond to. I DO want more brainstorming on ideas for the
naming of the package, and I think people need to cast a wider net for
naming ideas.

I'm most certainly not planning to get rid of the package whatsoever,
many of my systems have complex configurations that are made MUCH easier
with oldnet than any other network configuration system I have found.

Goals of gentoo-oldnet:
- Make oldnet functionality available to users of other init systems
  [1][2]
  - If a package upstream is forcing you towards systemd, you shouldn't
	have to lose other very useful packages.
- Seperate out development cycle from core OpenRC
  - oldnet accounts for more than 30% of OpenRC bugs, and a large
	fraction of the codebase.

History of the oldnet name:
- It's only called oldnet because when Roy introduced 'newnet', what we
  consider to be 'oldnet' didn't actually have a separate name.

Various proposed names (in no specific order):
- openrc-oldnet (implies OpenRC, and has 'old').
- openrc-gentoo-net (implies OpenRC)
- gentoo-networking (does this mean newnet is here too?)
- gen-net  (ditto)
- netrc (conflicts)
- opennetrc (implies OpenRC)
- 'net run control' (hard to search)
- 'net run configuration' (hard to search)
- multi-net (conflicts)
- netctl (conflicts)
- netcfg (conflicts)
- netconf (conflicts)
- enet (conflicts)
- posixsh-netconf (conflicts netconf)
- nettool (conflicts)
- netcfgtool (conflicts)
- posixnet (conflicts)
- shnettool

Naming goals:
- Should describe what it does
- Does NOT have a name conflict as verified by Google.
- Does NOT imply OpenRC.
- Implying Gentoo is fine, as it's where the package comes from.
- Should drop 'old'

I think we should focus on the first goal the most: 
"oldnet is a network configuring tool in pure POSIX shell"
So we probably want the substring 'net' somewhere in there. Beyond that,
all suggestions are welcome.

[1] There was a failed GSOC project that I mentioned several years ago,
that was to support ALL openrc style init.d scripts on Upstart, so
oldnet would have worked implicitly. Unfortunately the student didn't
actually do ANY work.

[2] The configuration itself ends up broken into two parts:
- directives that control the startup dependency tree.
- directives that control the actual configuration.
The former will need to be interoperable or exported to other init
systems in some way (hopefully dynamically), the latter can stay the
same.

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
Gentoo Linux: Developer, Trustee & Infrastructure Lead
E-Mail     : robbat2@g.o
GnuPG FP   : 11ACBA4F 4778E3F6 E4EDF38E B27B944E 34884E85