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guessnet for Debian
-------------------
* Small list of wishes that, if fulfilled, could help making ifupdown plus
guessnet a more useful combination:
- #76142, #92993, #96265, #129003, #164823, #171981, would help in having
an interesting default for when no test succeeds, especially when I'll
have implemented DHCP scans
- #204641 would help in having an even more interesting default for when no
test succeeds
- #139383 would help in passing options to guessnet in a more natural way
than using `map' lines, and would remove the need for a guessnet-ifupdown
symlink
- #224742 would help in starting to think of /etc/network/interfaces as a
common network configuration file shared by many, cooperating
applications using an elegant, consistent and documented syntax
- #225860 would help in making the Debian network configuration evolve.
No need of getting ajt out; however, it would be nice if ifupdown and the
other network configuration tools in Debian could be maintained by an
active task force like it happens with xfree and apache.
* Some thoughts on network detection and configuration on Debian
There are a lot of packages for automatic network detection and
reconfiguration on debian: whereami, laptop-netconf, laptop-net, netenv
and maybe others. IMHO they all have a problem: they do network detection
AND reconfiguration. This is a problem because Debian already has a way to
configure network interfaces, provided by the base package ifupdown.
Ifupdown already provides a way to define configuration profiles, and hooks
for selecting the good one. This means that Debian does not need a unique
tool for network detection AND reconfiguration, but two different tools, one
for network detection and one for system reconfiguration.
All the mentioned packages provide ways of detecting what the correct
configuration profile is, and ways for reconfiguring the system to use the
correct profile.
The problem is, they don't integrate with ifupdown. Guessnet is a solution
that does integrate with ifupdown. Unfortunately it doesn't implement all
the tests yet that would be necessary to make it useful for everyone.
Then we have the system reconfiguration part. For simple needs, ifupdown
can take care of it, possibly with the aid of a couple of up/pre-up/down/
post-down commands. For more complex needs, ifupdown alone doesn't provide
an adequate solution. Maybe the existing reconfiguration methods can be
hooked into ifupdown as wvdial has been, but I'm not confortable with the
entangled ifupdown sources to elaborate more on that. Maybe the problem of
system reconfiguration is intrinsically complex.
I'd like to cooperate with the authors and users of the involved packages
to address this problem and see what they think. If we share the same
concerns, maybe we should merge efforts and try to clean up the mess.
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