[arch-projects] [PATCH 0/7] Bash cleanup and migration away from net-tools

[Dave Reisner]

Hi all,

Hoping to get some movement on this list started early, so I'm peeling off some
patches from my git tree that I've had sitting around for a while. The first 6
are rudimentary cleanup -- they don't try to affect functionality, but rather
are meant to clean inconsistant or questionable syntax used, as well as
possibly shave off a few CPU cycles here and there.

The final patch is a little more controversial and proposes to remove the
decade old net-tools from the network service. This is a fairly straightforward
change that was patched in a similar manner several years ago by James Raynor
(iphitus), in response to FS #10160 which was eventually closed as "deferred".

For the uninitiated, net-tools still uses the old deprecated ioctl kernel
interface for getting/setting network data. While I'm not convinced that
this interface will ever go away, it seems reasonable to me to switch to
iproute2 which uses netlink sockets to communicate with the kernel. We can
leave net-tools available, but imo we should make an effort to eventually
move it from core and into extra. To that extent, there's a few of changes
we'll need to make elsewhere that I'll outline:

1) net-tools currently provides /bin/hostname. coreutils can provide this as
well -- we just need to enable it in ./configure.

2) Move yp-tools into core. With the above, coreutils' hostname util does not
have a facility to set a nis/yp domainname. yp-tools provides this in
/bin/domainname which needs to be enabled in ./configure. I'll further suggest
that we create the same symlinks net-tools provides to /bin/domainname to
ease the transition.

3) In conjunction with the above changes, we'll of course need to change
net-tools to not provide /bin/{host,{nis,yp,}domain}name.

This last patch really is more of an RFC, and I'm just looking to get the ball
rolling. I realize this would be a significant change and should not be taken
lightly.

Regards,
dave