Hi Theo, On 3/7/21 5:45 PM, Theo de Raadt wrote: > Paul Kelly <[email protected]> wrote: > >> So...here is a proposal for updating various man pages to try help >> others who make a similar migration to dhcpleased. It's a bit of a >> scattershot approach and the wording can probably be improved, but it is >> hopefully consistent with the existing pattern for describing auto >> interface configuration, and it at least should prompt a user to >> double-check their interface state before they (incorrectly) conclude >> that dhcpleased doesn't work on trunk interfaces. > > I don't understand where you are going with this type of documentation.
Fair enough. On reflection, the change to dhcpleased.8 isn't useful because it clumsily tries to make a point about dhcpleased behaviour that is only relevant in the context of dhclient behaviour. I still think the changes for hostname.if and ifconfig are relevant in the context of those man pages as they currently stand, because dhclient and slaacd are already described there. I'll try to add some justification for that below, but I also note that you're hinting at bigger things to come so it might all be redundant in the big picture. > Of course the interface has to be up. Interfaces that are down don't > participate in networking. It is obvious. It's a fair point, and it's certainly obvious when not relying on dhclient to do it automatically. It wasn't clear for me in the transition from dhclient to dhcpleased that the behaviour was different in this respect, and the commit message for dhcpleased seemed to indicate that it should only require a substitution of "dhcp" -> "inet autoconf" in hostname.if. The implicit reliance on dhclient's automatic behaviour is also present in the faq - faq6 makes a point that "dhcp" is all that is required with dhclient. So I wouldn't be too surprised if there are a number of people out there who could try to make the transition and end up scratching their head like I did. In my view there is also a small disconnect between the man pages for dhcpleased man page and hostname.if. The dhcpleased man page mentions the AUTOCONF4 flag and then delegates the details to the man pages for hostname.if and ifconfig. Those man pages don't appear to mention dhcpleased at all, and instead they provide context and examples for dhclient and slaacd. This is a bit jarring and leaves the impression that something is missing. So I don't mean to say there are major faults in the documentation here; but I do think that these relatively small changes would make the transition from dhclient more obvious. > We are discussing bringing the interfaces up in a more automatic > fashion, and then this won't matter. I can't really know exactly what you're alluding to here, but it's certainly possible to see some trends relating to network configuration in the past few weeks. I'm certainly interested to see where it goes. My presumption would normally be that this kind of work would be delayed until 6.10, based on the current timing of 6.9. But maybe there are still some surprises in store for the 6.9 release as well :)
