Re: Moving ppp-manager into ModemManager

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 2009-05-12 at 10:11 +0100, Roy Marples wrote:
> 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.

I meant pppd upstream is more responsive now.  dhcp upstream is not as
responsive.  But that doesn't necessarily mean that dhclient needs to be
rewritten from scratch at this time, if people really dislike dhclient
they should use some other client like dhcpcd :)  There are enough DHCP
clients to go around these days.

Dan

> 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
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