Am 16.04.2010 14:14, schrieb Aaron Griffin:
Well, a tool in netcfg for wireless configuration is necessary, but AIF shouldn't treat wireless interfaces the same as wired interfaces. I am unclear on the proper way to detect this in the days of deprecated iwconfig (Thomas? How would you list wired and wireless interfaces separately?) That covers #1 and #3.
See below.
Regarding direct editing of wpa_supplicant... I don't think that's "advanced" as Thomas suggests. It's heavily commented and not really that complex.
We still have no way in Arch to use "plain" wpa_supplicant, as it will never perform any IP configuration on its own. That's why we have net-auto-wireless.
Think about it this way: with wireless_tools being deprecated, wpa_supplicant is pretty much the defacto way to connect to wireless on linux. netcfg is an Arch specific tool. Users should know how to do this sort of thing in a distro-agnostic way.
netcfg is intuitive and self-explanatory. As mentioned above, messing with wpa_supplicant directly is not that useful on Arch.
As an aside, what about "iw". Where does that come from? Isn't it meant to replace iwconfig?
iw is the "new iwconfig" based on cfg80211. Basically, wireless extensions is deprecated, and thus all of wireless_tools. However, some old drivers (ipw2100, ipw2200) only have rudimentary cfg80211 support, so you still need wireless extensions for them. It's all a bit unfinished. In any case, all configuration should be done via wpa_supplicant, even for open networks, as that will work for both cfg80211 and wireless extensions with the same configuration. I suggest netcfg because it is very convenient and flexible - and you can specifiy your own wpa_supplicant configuration sections if you need something that netcfg doesn't support, so it supports anything. A dialog-driven netcfg profile generator has been on my imaginary TODO-list for some time. It would be great for new Arch users.
Actually, from the installer's perspective, locale.gen and mkinitcpio.conf are the only reasons to re-run either generation script. If other things change, the user had to do them *outside* the installer. From within the installer, the only thing you can do is change the config files. If those are unchanged, you're going to generate the exact same output as they did on install.
Assuming pacman does everything in the order we expect it to, yes.