[arch-releng] 2010.04.05 snapshots ready for testing

[Thomas Bächler]

Am 16.04.2010 10:12, schrieb Dieter Plaetinck:
>>> Last night I did a real install on a spare laptop using this ISO.
>>> It was ordinary and vanilla, but everything was happy and nice.
>>>
>>> My biggest issues were with regard to wireless.
>>>
>>> A) There's nothing for wireless networking in the network section.
>>> That'd be nice
>>> B) wpa_supplicant.conf would be a good config to add to the list,
>>> considering we're trying to enforce using that
>>> C) Auto configuring of rc.conf treats wireless interfaces as
>>> ethernet.
>>>
>>> None of these are really bugs. More like feature requests, I guess.
>>
>> A dialog-based configuration tool that generates a netcfg profile
>> would be very nice here, it would allow all kinds of configurations,
>> including different wireless modes.
> 
> I rarely use wireless so forgive my ignorance.
> 1) wpa_supplicant is in base. is this needed? or should it be added to
> the list @ http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/18495

Probably not, as none of the other wireless tools are in base. We should
rather add it to the base-wireless group, which I wanted to create for
some time now :)
We could then list that base-wireless group in the installer and anyone
will say "Hey, wireless, I want that" and select it.

> 2) what's wrong with C) ? network settings in rc.conf are IP stuff, so
> wlan and eth interfaces can be treated the same, no?

Wireless interfaces in rc.conf need extra configuration in
/etc/conf.d/wireless. This configuration file uses the (deprecated)
iwconfig tool and only supports open and WEP networks.
In my eyes, wireless configuration through this mechanism is deprecated
and shouldn't be supported at all. I even wanted to remove it from
initscripts, but last time I brought it up, Aaron blocked me on it.

> 3) maybe i should grep all interfaces in /etc/rc.conf, check if they
> are wireless ones with iwconfig, and if so add /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
> to the list? (or: if wpa_supplicant gets installed if it gets out of
> base)

Editing wpa_supplicant.conf directly is something only a very
experienced user would do, and even then I don't think it's a good idea,
because we have no tools in Arch that can use this configuration properly.
We shouldn't encourage users to do this.

> Basically, you need to tell me what the best practices are to set up
> wireless networking, how i should store that to the configs and what
> things that should change (such as adding wpa_supplicant.conf to the
> list of files to edit)
> Or maybe do it directly as feature requests on flyspray, as the chance
> that I'll do it anytime soon is small.

The recommended pratice in Arch to set up wireless is creating a netcfg
profile (or several) and using the net-auto-wireless daemon. It's the
most straight-forward and reliable way to use wireless on Arch and
supports wireless roaming as well as automatic reconnection.

IMO, a tool to generate netcfg profiles dialog-based is something that
should be added to netcfg and then may be used from AIF. In any case, we
should encourage users to rely on netcfg for any network setup that is
more complex than just running dhcp on an ethernet interface.

There are some ways that are supported through extra (networkmanager,
wicd), but afaik they rely on GUI to work.

>>> And one other thing unrelated to wireless:
>>> If I didn't edit mkinitcpio.conf, there's no need to generate the
>>> initramfs again in the config section. Perhaps md5sum the config
>>> files before and after editing to see if a given action is
>>> necessary?
>>
>> Good idea I guess.
>>
> 
> there's has been some discussion about why we do mkinitcpio and
> locale-gen twice
> http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/15680
> does mkinitcpio *only* depend on /etc/mkinitcpio.conf, i.e. if that
> file is the same (but anything else can change) we don't need to
> regenerate mkinitcpio?
> AFAIK things are be a bit more complicated then that and may
> not be worth the extra hassle of implementing the needed checks and
> stuff.

Everything that is necessary for a standard configuration is installed
before mkinitcpio, so the image that is generated on 'pacman -S
kernel26' should be fine. As soon as you add any extra hooks (which AIF
does on its own, too), AIF must regenerate the image.

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