2:15 p.m.
On 01/06/2011 02:03 PM, Zdenek Styblik wrote:
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Hello,
On 01/05/2011 04:43 PM, Laine Stump wrote:
> On 01/05/2011 06:12 AM, Zdenek Styblik wrote:
>
> Zdenek - I'd be very happy to have a Slackware port of netcf, and would
> be willing to help out getting it in (as long as you'd be willing to
> help me setup a Slackware guest so I could test your patches ;-) There
> have been 4 other people who started netcf ports (debian, arch linux,
> suse, and (believe it or not, MS Windows)), but so far none has followed
> through to actually pushing something into the main netcf git.
>
just wait a second; did you actually say "patches"? :) What is the
original platform/distro of NetCF?
It was originally developed for Fedora and RHEL (RHEL5.x up to a point,
but now only RHEL6 support is up-to-date due to libnl version
incompatibilities on 5.x).
Because the network config files differ for different distros, there are
a couple of files that need to be different for each (or in some cases
where two distros are very close, maybe they can share the same source
files, with a few #ifdefs). The files defining the API, and implementing
the toplevel functions of the API should be common to all platforms, and
there is also a file of utility functions that should be useful on all
Linux platforms (but not on Windows).
As far as I know, the SuSE port was actually complete at one time, and
was included in a released product (not sure what the product is), but I
don't know where the source is (aside from earlier versions posted to
the list and available in the archives), and the developers haven't had
the resources available to clean it up and submit it back to the
upstream project. The debian and Windows ports have had patches posted
that were at the RFC level, but nothing committable yet. If I recall
correctly, the Arch Linux port was at the level of someone asking for
recommendations on how to proceed, but there haven't been any patches yet.
It shouldn't matter if they've pushed changes or not as long
as those
are public somewhere.
Well, there is stuff in the mailing list archives, but it's all out of
date, because a couple months ago, based on problems revealed by the
Windows patches, I did some re-organizing of the files to better
separate the platform-specific stuff from the common stuff.
Anyway, I gave it # ./configure; go and found out 'augeas',
whatever
that is, is "missing". And I expect more to come.
It's possible to make a netcf port that doesn't use augeas. The
Fedora/RHEL port uses it to parse all the separate
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* files into something regular,
then convert that into the API-defined XML format, and to write changes
back to the ifcfg-* files (while maintaining the stuff in those files
that isn't affected by the changes).
The Fedora/RHEL port also uses libxslt2, and it would be possible to
make a port without that as well, although you likely will end up
wanting it, since it will make creating and parsing the XML required by
the API much simpler.
On Slackware, it looks like all the network config for all devices is in
a single file, */etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf
<http://www.slackware.com/config/network.php#rc.inet1>;. To create a
Slackware port of netcf, you would want to write a drv_slackware.c that
implemented all the drv_*() functions declared in *internal.h (using
drv_initscripts.c as an example); if you don't want/need augeas to do
that, you won't need to link it in.
Of course there are some kinks - for example, I just noticed that,
although the intent is for the functions in util_linux.c to be useful on
all Linux platforms, there are several in there that are only useful if
you're using augeas (which maybe should be put into a new
util_augeas.c), and I also see that dutil.c (which was intended to be
useful on *all* platforms) #includes augeas.h, although it doesn't seem
to actually use any augeas functions (this is a leftover from old code,
and can likely just be removed).
I can give it look over the weekend(no, I don't expect it to be
done
over the weekend - look :]).
Don't worry, I wouldn't expect that either - it's going to require
writing code that will transform the .INI file style info into XML, and
from XML back to the .INI style. Even with libxlt2, that isn't exactly
trivial (augeas can very likely help, though - it's very good at
grabbing a single value from a file and modifying it without screwing up
the rest of the file; so it's very likely you *will* want augeas, you'll
just use it differently).
Slackware guest shouldn't be a problem. It's just like any
other
GNU/Linux. Setup partition, run setup, key stroke, key stroke, Install
everything? [Yes], done :D j/k
[...]
> The first step would be to subscribe to the netcf-devel mailing list:
Done.
> I can help you out figuring out which bits need replacing for a
> different platform (although I'm afraid I probably can't be much help
> with what they should be replaced with :-)
Sounds great. I probably should note I'm more like # ./configure&& make
&& ...&& makepkg; and some hack-n-slash person.
It doesn't mean anything else than just making things clear(so much for
expectations) :)