Re: Making NM portable

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Thu, 2008-09-25 at 01:17 +0530, Debarshi Ray wrote:
> So I have some FreeBSD support using PF_ROUTE sockets. It is possible
> to show the routing table, and soon it will support addition and
> deletion of routes. At the same time I am reworking the Linux backend
> to use libnl instead of directly mucking with PF_NETLINK.
> 
> My private tree is available here:
> git://bombadil.infradead.org/~rishi/inetutils.git (see libroute/ and
> route/) At the moment it is quite out of date with my working
> directory. :-)
> 
> It would be very helpful if someon could enlist the basic
> functionality that NetworkManager would need from a library that
> abstracts out different kernels' interfaces. It looks to that atleast
> the following are needed:
> + flush
> + add
> + delete
> + monitor

If by 'monitor' you mean enumerate, then yes.  This applies to _both_
addresses and routes.

NM also uses netlink for interface flag changes like carrier state, but
that may be out of the scope of libroute.  It looks like you're
hand-rolling netlink code though; any reason you can't back the Linux
stuff with libnl since Thomas already wrote all that stuff already?

I'd actually rather just link to libnl on Linux and libroute on *BSD I
think, abstracting the two inside NM.  Because unless you want to
basically copy the functionality of libnl into libroute (which might
take a while) it's probably easier to just abstract it in NM.

> Anything else?
> 
> Since GNU Inetutils is under GPLv3+ the license notices mention it,
> but I am planning to mark 'libroute' as LGPLv3+ to make it easy for
> GPLv2+ programs like NetworkManager to use it.

It could also be GPLv2+ and I think you'd be fine :)  Your call.

Dan