Re: Moving ppp-manager into ModemManager

[Roy Marples <roy marples name>]

On Tuesday 12 May 2009 00:19:01 Dan Williams wrote:
> Yeah, PPP code is icky.  But just like dhclient, it doesn't need
> rewriting.  There are certainly more worthwhile things to spend time on.
> It's got a responsive upstream who accepts patches, why not fix the
> specific issues you have and upstream the patches.

If that's the case, why do plently of distros have quite invasive patches to 
dhclient? The latest fedora SRPM has no less than 20 patches and a fully 
cutomised dhclient-script (ok, the script isn't needed for NM). I also know 
that Gentoo ships quite a few patches as well. What's more, some distributions 
have different options on the same command line switch which makes things even 
more difficult.

Now, lets take a look at bloat:
$ size /sbin/dhclient /sbin/dhcpcd
   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
 271971    5016   38508  315495   4d067 /sbin/dhclient
  70784     736    3952   75472   126d0 /sbin/dhcpcd

Thats Gentoo/i386 dhclient-3.1.1 and dhcpcd-5.0.3

Why is dhclient so damn big? The last time I checked, dhcpcd also took about 
33% less memory when running as well. It can't be features either - dhclient 
can do two things that dhcpcd cannot (one is deprecated by newer RFC's and the 
other i don't like from a design perspective) whilst dhcpcd can do at least 10 
things I can think of that dhclient can't.

Then we have the configuration aspect of it - NM has to write out a special 
configuration file just to play nice. dhcpcd is fully configurable from the 
command line as well as a config file.

But you're correct - dhclient doesn't need re-writing, it needs replacing :)

Thanks

Roy