On (01/26/09 09:50), Sebastien Roy wrote: > On Sun, 2009-01-25 at 22:36 -0800, Erik Nordmark wrote: > > sowmini.varadhan at sun.com wrote: > > > > > As you point out, the converse situation holds for ifconfig- > > > all ifconfig operations today are non-persistent, so the library > > > really needs to be able to do both versions (in order to > > > support both ipadm and ifconfig needs), though ifconfig is > > > not going to start support the "persistent/non-persistent" flag. > > > > If we think we can finish this (libipadm with persistence and being used > > by ifconfig) by the next minor release then we can at least consider > > making persistent the only way - even when ifconfig is used as the CLI. > > While it could be considered, I think it would be too risky a change > even for a Minor release, and maybe even for a Major release. I don't > think it would be acceptable to require 3rd party software to be > modified to undo unwanted persistent configuration.
Or we could disallow the mix/match of ifconfig and ipadm. ifconfig would only be able to do temporary changes, and ipadm only does the persistent ones. In order to achieve this, the library would have to support both temporary and permanent settings. And to enforce it, the library would have to track the "temporary/permanent" status of the underlying object. Or we could just have all ipadm/ifconifg operations on interfaces to be temporary (only the interface-agnostic operations on the tcp/ip module itself would be persistent), and implement one single method for persistence thorugh libnwamd. --Sowmini > On a related note, if ipadm is the preferred way to configure a system, > what is the programmatic model for IP configuration from shell scripts > in this new world order? Surely, knowing that there exists software > that dynamically configures IP interfaces on the fly with no need (nor > want) for persistent configuration (think VPN server), then a > persistent-only ipadm by itself won't be very friendly. > > If we want such software to migrate to ipadm and not use ifconfig for > perpetuity, then what is the story for such software? One obvious > answer is that ipadm needs to support temporary configuration. There > may be other answers.
