Re: Making NM portable

[David Cantrell <dcantrell redhat com>]

On Sep 25, 2008, at 7:26 AM, Dan Williams wrote:

> 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 route/) At the moment it is quite out of date with my working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.

Going to agree with Dan here.  Not really a need to make libroute do  
what libnl does... we already have libnl.  We can create the necessary  
abstractions inside NetworkManager so we can work with either libnl or  
libroute.

> > 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.


LGPLv3+ will only work if the software that links to libroute is  
GPLv2+ (the '+' being the key), I think.  I mean, I'm not a licensing  
expert.  I would check this page out (in particular, the GPL  
compatibility matrix):
	https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing

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