I was really happy a few years back, when
Martin announced he'd start working
on
netconf. Not just
because I agreed with his assessment that ifupdown needed replacement;
also because I had been thinking about a good way to implement such a
thing, and had been planning to start writing 'soon'. With Martin's
announcement, I made a few suggestions to give him some input, and then
put my plans away I had more important things to take care of,
anyway.
Unfortunately, netconf did not manage to reach the ambitious goals
that Martin set out, mainly due to lack of contributors. I wanted to
help out; I really did. But Martin's choice of python to implement a
'prototype' which then had to be reimplemented in C or C++ didn't get me
very thrilled. Not just because I have a severe dislike of python; also
because implementing something twice is, in my humble opinion, not quite
the best way to do something like this.
But hey, who am I, if I don't put my code out there.
Never the less, I tried helping. I really did. During debconf8 at Mar
del Plata, I approached Martin with the suggestion that I start
reimplementing those bits that were unlikely to change anymore in C, as
a first step toward something that could be in the base system.
Unfortunately, that didn't happen. After trying for about two weeks, I
just gave up. I
thought I could read python code and
reimplement that so that it would work the same way, but I couldn't. I
thought I could implement python modules in C without knowing
python, but as it turns out that's a laughable idea.
For several months then, I didn't think about it anymore. In March of
this year, however, I got a little bored. And what does one do when they
get bored? Right, you find something to do. I my case, that was 'figure
out how bison works'. I'd of course known about parser generators for
quite a while, but just never had the time to dive in deep and figure
out how they work. When I needed to do a config file for
nbd, I instead hand-wrote my
parser and used a lexer from libglib. But I wanted to learn how to do
things properly, so I sat down.
Long story short, when I had to choose something somewhat more
complex to implement, I thought 'how about a hypothetical config file
for a network configuration utility', and I started implementing that.
It turned out to be fun, so I didn't stop after I knew enough about
bison. And just last week, for the first time I successfully used it to
bring up my wired interface using DHCP -- and bring it down again. It
can also already manage static interfaces through netlink, though it
isn't quite able to the equivalent of 'ip addr flush' yet.
Fun.
The system is quite flexible. It has a plugin interface (which
needed some refinement that I did using some help on IRC just today),
which should allow developers to implement extra functionality by just
dropping a shared object in the right directory. In fact, I'm working on
the wireless support (hence my
blog post of last
week) as a plugin.
Obviously the code isn't remotely ready yet. The wireless code has a
long way to go. The firewall module needs to be started. It will
probably crash and burn if put to the test. But even so, it already has
one feature that ifupdown, in its 10 years of existence, never acquired:
it will
not try to DHCP off an interface if it finds out that
there is no cable connected to it unless you wrote a configuration
that asks you to do so.
I wanted things to be as simple as possible, and therefore the
minimal valid configuration file that will do something useful is the
following:
That's right, it's empty. This will cause the system to bring up the
'lo' interface at bootup, and do nothing else. If you say 'ifup eth0',
where eth0 is a valid and existing interface, it will first check
whether there is a link, and if so, DHCP off of it.
There's much to do still, but I have now reached a point where I feel
the system is ready to meet all challenges it should be able to meet (or
so I hope), and where it might be nice if interested people check it
out.
The code is in a git repository that's mirrored on
git.debian.org,
github.com, and my own
git.grep.be. The latter
is my --mirror repository, but is not available for cloning to anyone
else. If you're interested in checking it out, you may want to start
with doc/tech.txt, and/or examples/ipcfg.cfg. I updated the former just
yesterday, so it's quite up-to-date. On the other hand, while the latter
shows the direction I would like the system to take, the code is a far
cry from implementing everything shown there, and it has been a while
since I last checked that file out, so the comments in there are, in
some cases, somewhat outdated. But that's good, because I want to keep
the file as a reference of the goals that I originally had, before I'd
written this whole corpus of code, so that I can go back at some
undefined point in the future and fix things.
Comments are (more than) welcome.
Martin rants about the German electoral system. From his rant, I'll pick up only two points And I'll try to connect with Toxicore's excelent (Spanish) blog post, where he quotes political analist Denise Dresser.
Dresser has made a great point: Our probably-imposed, legitimacy-impaired president Felipe Calder n has requested the society to talk good about Mexico, to project a positive image of the country. Dresser says, yes, there is a lot of good to talk about the country, and we should emphasize on its richness and beauty, invite people to come and visit, to know what the country is really like. But at the same time, it is our duty to talk bad about the bad areas and decisions of our government, as that is the best (if not the only) thing many of us can do to really get things to happen That is what we can do to push our country's good things forward, to make the country sustainable, to pull attention towards what needs (such as the very very deplorable cases of censorship, human rights violation, ecosystem predation we have seen in the last years).
Anyway... What did I want to comment about Martin's post? He criticizes Germany's law requiring a 5% quota for a party to have parliamentary representation.
In Mexico, the minimum is 2%. Most people agree, though, that it is too low, and that we should push to increase it. Why? Because the money that is spent in supporting the party system. In Mexico, when a political party fails to get 2% of the vote, it is basically disbanded and it is very hard for it to regroup, to compete again.
Many people believe we should aim to a political system with as few political parties as possible (such as the semi-democratic system they have in the USA). I strongly prefer the system found in most European (and even many South American) countries where there is a real wealth of ideological positions represented, and where governments have to be formed by agreeing to form coalitions, as it is almost impossible for them to get full majority.
I would much rather see Mexico march towards a parliamentary-based political system, away from the presidential one. Of course, that is almost impossible to expect.
With the current political system, we are bound to have forever few monolithic, meaningless political parties. We will likely converge on three blocks, following the current three major blocks (leftoid PRD, centroid PRI, rightoid PAN). They are different in some important senses, yes, but in general they are much the same. I don't hold any hopes to ever see something like the Pirate Party appearing in our system...
I ve been back from KDE (4.2!) to Gnome and with the mighty powers of Compiz my desktop is the envy of my Windows coworkers and still geeky functional. Well, somehow functional. For a while I wondered why I can t properly use VNC to remote-control my desktop from home. The connection works and I see the desktop but nothing seems to happen when I click or type. Now I figured out the desktop in the VNC client window is just not refreshed while my mouse and keyboard actions really do what they were supposed to on the VNC server. This is my sad tale of how I learned that a regression may mean driving the motorcycle to work in the middle of the night after cursing VNC. 
After a little searching through the lazyweb I found out that it s a 
[Sorry to my sponsorees who's package sponsoring requests were delayed again due to this mess.]
After month of collecting little fixes flying around, I release 
Since all the cool kids are doing it, here are some of the more interesting
stats from the Google analysis tools. The third most popular search term
used to hit my site has been '
Since I've started
today writing about 
It's been a while since I blogged about something. So here's a bunch of things I've done the last month.
Holidays
Well, I've been in holidays one week. :-P
awesome
There have been a huge number of changes between 3.3 (released in June) and 3.4 (almost relesed). I wrote a small but very useful object layer on top of Lua, which adds a class/object system a bit like 
Google Summer Of Code 2009
I've mentored Mariusz Ceier on 
Dear Lazyweb,
I've been having problems with 
Why would all the presenters at a Software Freedom event be using MacOS X?
this weekend while giving a bit of TLC to the php packages, i
thought i'd finally get around to tackling 
Advantages:
Advantages:
Advantages:
Modern daemon implementations can be run in a variety of ways, in a range of contexts. The daemon software itself can be a useful tool in environments where the associated traditional system service is neither needed nor desired. Unfortunately, common debian packaging practice has a tendency to conflate the two ideas, leading to some potentially nasty problems where only the tool itself is needed, but the system service is set up anyway. How would i fix it? i'd suggest that we make a distinction between packages that provide tools and packages that provide system services. A package that provides the system service foo would need to depend on a package that provides the tool foo. But the tool foo should be available through the package manager without setting up a system service automatically. Bad Examples Here are some examples of this class of problem i've seen recently: