Re: [gentoo-dev] renaming gentoo-oldnet

[Alan McKinnon]

On 06/08/2013 00:09, Robin H. Johnson wrote:
> 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.
>


The software was originally called "net", right? Perhaps not officially,
but certainly colloquially.

Why not just keep the name "net" and leave other newer systems to come
up with their own names?

I do agree that modifiers "old" and "new" are bad ideas - they come
about because of the environment and no the software itself.

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@×××××.com