[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#699749: Bug#699749: Incompatible change in the ifupdown hooks interface

[Michael Biebl]

Hi,

On 06.03.2013 15:21, Andrew Shadura wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> On 6 March 2013 13:45, Michael Biebl <biebl at debian.org> wrote:
>> A quick grep over all unpacked packages shipping ifupdown hooks show 60
>> hook scripts which don't have ADDRFAM set.
>> I haven't checked them individually, though.
> 
> They usually check for interface name to match "eth*" or something,

Checking for  hard-coded interface name sounds like a terrible idea.
Especially in hindsight of tools like biosdevname or the new interface
naming scheme in udev.

> which is supposed to work. Somehow it did happen I haven't noticed
> avahi-daemon to have this thing, so that's why it's not fixed. Other
> packages I expect to work flawlessly.

When you say "expect", does that mean you didn't actually check those
hook scripts individually?

>>> I don't know why these --all calls are a useful thing for ifupdown to do,
>>> but I do think it's the responsibility of the avahi package to sensibly
>>> ignore values of $ADDRFAM that it doesn't understand.
> 
>> What I'm not happy about is, that such a change was made without
>> notifiying the affected package maintainers *in advance* with clear
>> instructions how to address this. Ideally via the BTS.
>> Such documentation and instructions are still missing.
> 
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/04/msg00448.html

This is all nice, but you can't expect every maintainer to read
debian-devel. So a bug report for affected package maintainers would
have been nice. Ideally user-tagged etc, so progress can be monitored.

> By the way, quoting myself, “Network Manager already uses similar
> approach, so if anything can break, it's been broken for a long time
> already.”

Not sure what this quote is supposed to mean and why you bring up NM in
this context.

>> Andrew, care to explain what a package maintainer is supposed to
>> consider when shipping such a hook? The existing documentation is rather
>> scarce on this topic.
> 
> Handle what you can, ignore everything else. Check ADDRFAM, METHOD or
> interface name (unreliable a bit) and decide if you need to continue
> execution or not. It'd be easier to give recommendations if I knew
> what exactly is unclear in the documentation, I've tried to explain
> thing to be easily understandable.

I guess what I'm missing is a section in the ifup or interfaces man page
called "ifupdown for package maintainters and how to integrate your
service with ifupdown". With recommendations, examples, best practices, etc.

Michael


-- 
Why is it that all of the instruments seeking intelligent life in the
universe are pointed away from Earth?

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