[arch-releng] 2010.04.05 snapshots ready for testing

[Thomas Bächler]

Am 16.04.2010 14:14, schrieb Aaron Griffin:
> 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.

See below.

> 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.

We still have no way in Arch to use "plain" wpa_supplicant, as it will
never perform any IP configuration on its own. That's why we have
net-auto-wireless.

> 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.

netcfg is intuitive and self-explanatory. As mentioned above, messing
with wpa_supplicant directly is not that useful on Arch.

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

iw is the "new iwconfig" based on cfg80211. Basically, wireless
extensions is deprecated, and thus all of wireless_tools. However, some
old drivers (ipw2100, ipw2200) only have rudimentary cfg80211 support,
so you still need wireless extensions for them. It's all a bit unfinished.
In any case, all configuration should be done via wpa_supplicant, even
for open networks, as that will work for both cfg80211 and wireless
extensions with the same configuration.

I suggest netcfg because it is very convenient and flexible - and you
can specifiy your own wpa_supplicant configuration sections if you need
something that netcfg doesn't support, so it supports anything. A
dialog-driven netcfg profile generator has been on my imaginary
TODO-list for some time. It would be great for new Arch users.

> 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.

Assuming pacman does everything in the order we expect it to, yes.


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