Re: new modules consensus

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On Tue, 2004-08-17 at 17:26 +0100, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Mon, 2004-08-16 at 12:00, Alan Cox wrote:
> > On Llu, 2004-08-16 at 10:16, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > > >    - gnome-nettool
> > 
> > Disagree. It's simply not reliable enough or debugged enough yet. Basic
> > stuff like the traceroute option go strange with multipath for example.
> 
> 	To me, it sounds like these are "just bugs" that won't affect most
> users too badly rather than blocking issues with the design or quality
> of the program. If these are relatively minor issues that could easily
> be fixed during stable releases, then I don't think there's a big
> problem here. Maybe I'm mis-understanding the importance of the issues,
> but its hard to judge without bug reports.
> 
Germán is starting to work on the issues raised by Alan, so yes, those
are nothing that would prevent the inclusion, IMO, just bugs that can be
fixed when there are bug reports.

> 	Last time around discussing gnome-nettool, I was worried about how
> potentially flakey it is to parse the (fairly complex) output of command
> line tools like this and how its completely non-portable and prone to
> future changes. I'm still worried about that, but the consensus seems to
> be that we include it regardless of concerns like this.
> 
yes, there are no good alternatives though, since for instance, a normal
user can't open ICMP sockets, so we rely on the ping command. For other
commands, it would be a good idea to try to move to our own
implementations, so that we don't rely on the output of the systems'
implementations. We indeed do that for the port scanning tool.
-- 
Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>