Re: Making NM portable

[David Cantrell <dcantrell redhat com>]

On Sep 5, 2008, at 6:39 PM, Debarshi Ray wrote:

> > currently Linux-specific is random bits to get info from the wireless
> > card (which could be replaced by enhancing the wpa_supplicant dbus
> > interface) and the routing and addressing stuff (which is pretty well
> > encapsulated in libnl already and could be separated out in NM  
> > itself).
>
> Isn't libnl PF_NETLINK socket specific? *BSDs use PF_ROUTE sockets
> which differ from their PF_NETLINK counterparts.

NM's use of libnl and iproute2 will cause portability problems, yes.

> > It would be interesting to try a quick port and see just how much  
> > needs
> > to be changed and then start figuring out how best to break up the  
> > code
> > in SVN to help that effort.  Care to take a stab? :)
>
> I had a brief look at the code, and found that we need to replace the
> parts which directly spawn iproute2 utilities. Would you to replace
> those parts with API calls to some library?


For the most part (what I've seen in the code), NM is using libnl in  
as many places where it will work.  Some things were not implemented  
in libnl and NM calls /sbin/ip directly.  I think moving NM to using  
libnl completely is the best idea.  It should not be using /sbin/ip.

--
David Cantrell <dcantrell redhat com>
Red Hat / Honolulu, HI