[arch-releng] 2010.04.05 snapshots ready for testing

Aaron Griffin aaronmgriffin at gmail.com
Fri Apr 16 08:14:48 EDT 2010


On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 3:12 AM, Dieter Plaetinck <dieter at plaetinck.be> wrote:
> On Fri, 16 Apr 2010 09:35:21 +0200
> Thomas Bächler <thomas at archlinux.org> wrote:
>
>> Am 16.04.2010 01:19, schrieb Aaron Griffin:
>> > Sending from my phone, so I apologize for the top posting.
>> >
>> > 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
> 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?
> 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)
>
> 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.

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.

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.
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.

As an aside, what about "iw". Where does that come from? Isn't it
meant to replace iwconfig?

>> > 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.

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.


More information about the arch-releng mailing list