On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 8:43 PM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee@gmail.com> wrote:
I do- making a system unbootable without a config change is never a good idea. My hope with selection number 2 was that no one using a "normal" config would have to change anything, e.g. those using headless systems would not have to tweak any dials.
This is a good point (which I should have elaborated on). The problem is that there is currently no limit to what weird things people might use the network script to do, so it is very hard to keep 100% backwards compatibility (unless we opt for not changing anything at all). What I had in mind was to map the old configuration to the new one in such a way that those who had a vanilla setup before would not notice anything. However, those who set up weird stuff would have to change their config. Note that we cannot keep 100% backwards compatibility if we want to move to iproute2 (which I really think we should as net-tools has been dead for more than 10 years), so something would have to break (Dave, correct me if I'm wrong here...). So the question is: is it worth trying to keep some network functionality in initscripts, taking into account that we cannot be 100% backwards compatible? Alternatively, is backwards compatibility so important that we should not change it at all? -t