Re: [gentoo-dev] Baselayout 2 stabilisation todo

[Roy Marples]

Alin Năstac wrote:
> Doug Goldstein wrote:
>> The only reason why OpenRC has not come up for stabilization by it's
>> maintainers is the fact that everytime there's a new version readied
>> for release, on the horizon there's new incompatible changes being
>> planned for the next version. The OpenRC maintainers in Gentoo have
>> always chosen to wait until OpenRC settles down a little bit. Now with
>> the plan to drop support for certain features (ADSL and PPP support in
>> the networking code), it's going to rewrite more Gentoo people to step
>> up to develop and maintain this code.
>>
> rp-pppoe support should be removed because its scripts don't work well
> under baselayout, but are you sure OpenRC mantainers also plan to drop
> generic PPP support?

I don't usually troll -dev anymore, but I feel urged to reply to this.

Basically as Doug said, each OpenRC version comes with a few big
chances. Well not massive as in "your box will break now", but just a
different spin on how things should work. OpenRC-0.5 will have the
biggest re-spin to date - net.lo (net.eth0 etc) is considered deprecated.

Instead OpenRC now ships with network (provides net) which is a simple
wrapper around calling ifconfig (or ip) and with the ability to run
shell scripts. Attached is the new conf.d/net sample. You'll notice it's
a lot smaller than the old one as it relies heavily on the user being
able to read and understand man pages for userland tools requires to do
the job.

Now, the one weakness with this approach is that the Linux userland
tools are quite frankly crap compared to the BSD counterparts. Why is
there the need for many badly written tools to configure a network
interface? As such, a side project I've started is a new ifconfig tool
[1] to handle everything from vlans, to bridging, to bonding, to
wireless (up to WEP) with a similar syntax to the BSD ifconfig.

However, work on this has stopped as a side product of this means I have
to get some wpa_supplicant changes I have pushed upstream so it can
start on any wireless interface - and when it appears (pcmcia, etc).

One side effect of this is that daemons such was wpa_supplicant and PPP
are now init scripts proper - this is good. The only downside is that
you lose the ability to control each interface via init.d. Instead I
propose you control this via ifconfig.

This decision is heavily influenced by NetBSD (disclaimer - I'm now a
NetBSD dev).

FWIW, the only re-spin I have on my list is to remove dependencies from
rc and runscript so that dependencies are only taken into account when
rc is run and not for each script. Essentially, making rc and runscript
light shell wrappers and removing a few tools so that it's smaller for
space critical devices.

Thanks

Roy