[arch-dev-public] New wireless and network scripts.

[Thomas Bächler]

Hi James,

I am not saying I don't appreciate your work, but I am posting here to
point out a few things I don't like about our old and new network
scripts (more for general discussion than related to your specific efforts):

A network "profile" is always only one interface. I'd expect a profile
to be several interfaces that are activated all at once and are sort of
tied together (I didn't read your latest version yet, did you already
add such a thing?).

That leads me to the second: While configuration via bash-script is easy
for the programmer (you can simply parse it via 'source'), it is unsafe
and becomes rather complicated when features are added. Especially when
we want more than one interface in a profile, it becomes messy. I would
suggest a inifile-like configuration style where each section '[foo]'
marks an interface. This is much more readable to the user and allows
more flexibility but itis not as easy to work with.

Last but not least, invoking our netcfg tool from a GUI or any other
external application is not optimal. netcfg is a shell script, but IMO
should be a library. We could then have proper bindings to C/C++/python
and so on. Also, when it becomes more complicated, writing bash becomes
ugly very fast.

I actually started a little C++ implementation of the above ideas, but
got lost in bison/flex soon (anyone wanna give me a crash course on how
to do it right? I have a parser that works good enough so I can start
experimenting, but nothing fool-proof). I may or may not continue this
work soon. The current state is this: Nothing works, I have many ideas,
a highly experimental framework and hopefully some free time soon.

Open for discussion :)

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