[arch-general] netcfg testing and git packages

[James Rayner]

Hi

The release beta cycle wasn't working well for netcfg. Small changes,
bugs and many FR's got held up far too long while other work happened.
To try and help get netcfg development going smoothly again I've
uploaded some netcfg git PKGBUILDs  to the AUR to use instead of -beta
releases.

This way I can make those small changes, push it to git, and it can be
tested immediately, while larger things can be safely done in another
branch locally. When it's ready, rc's will be released.

http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=23953
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=23954

There's some fairly substantial changes in this release.
 - Moving from net-tools to iproute
     - iproute is the way forward. net-tools is long unmaintained, nor
as capable.
 - Moving from wireless_tools to pure wpa_supplicant
     - More reliable, less quirks required. Hopefully more stable.
     - As part of this, wireless moves into netcfg-wireless (dependency issues)

Both of these require config changes. Once they're both stabilised I
can release 2.2.x to give people time to migrate, and eventually 2.5
which will use them by default. There are example configs included.

More details on the wiki:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Network_Profiles_development

The wpa_supplicant move needs a significant amount of testing. I
havn't tested WEP (testing hardware is gone), and net-auto may not
work presently. WPA and custom WPA configs work in my testing.

If there's any criticisms or comments about the way this is going, the
code, netcfg, etc, please let me know. I'd like to make 2.2 a good
release and I think these changes are important. I'm hoping they'll
make netcfg simpler and more reliable.

Cheers,
James