Re: Initial libnl support committed

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Fri, 2005-10-28 at 11:36 -0400, Robert Love wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-10-27 at 23:24 -0400, Dan Williams wrote:
> 
> > You can get libnl-1.0-pre3 from here:
> > 
> > http://people.suug.ch/~tgr/libnl/
> 
> This webpage does not instill an overwhelming sense of confidence in the
> stability or long-term viability of libnl.

Well, if Thomas goes away, at least the code is around, as with all OSS
projects.

> Is this solid code?  Is anything else using it?  I have never even heard
> of it.

Here's my argument.  I was going to have to talk to netlink anyway.  You
evidently can't do stuff like remove duplicate IP addresses from
interfaces with ioctl().  Routing table manipulation code is insane with
ioctl().  Netlink is obviously the way to go, I don't think anyone would
disagree.

So we have a choice: (a) find and use an existing library, or (b) write
our own.  We'd end up taking a month to write the library that we need,
which Thomas has already done.  And our code would be even less tested
than libnl already is, since we'd be starting from scratch.  I'm not
sure what writing our own netlink library would buy us over libnl.  He's
already done the work, so we don't have to...

AFAIK, there are no existing netlink convenience/shim libraries other
than libnl.  We _could_ suck in a private copy of libnl, but nobody
likes to do that, nobody thinks doing this is a good idea that _I_ know
of, and it's pretty much the same thing as using it externally.

I've mentioned for about 4 or 5 months that moving to libnl is the
forward looking plan, were you simply looking for more lead-time before
the change happened?  I agree that committing the code was a bit abrupt,
yes.  But from my perspective, it was either now, or at some later
point, like a month from now.  If you'd  like some configure-time magic
to use either an external or an internal version of the lib so you don't
have to actually package libnl, I'd entertain that idea and take a patch
for it.

Dan