[NCLUG] Fedora 6 and the RaLink rt2500 wireless card

[Chad Perrin]

On Tue, Dec 12, 2006 at 08:49:50AM -0700, Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 11, 2006 at 12:37:59PM -0700, Chad Perrin wrote:
> >I never said it wasn't there or didn't work.  Please read previous
> 
> The point Kevin was trying to make is that you, in response to Stephen's
> question about what the "standard" tool for network configuration (across
> Gentoo, Debian, and Slackware) was, replied "ifconfig".  Obviously, that's
> going to apply also to Mandrake, SuSE, Fedora, Red Flag, etc...
> 
> >messages where I made reference to the way RPM distros tend to encourage
> >the use of distro-specific tools rather than more universal tools.
> 
> This just seems to be your perception.  As others have mentioned, the tools
> in Red Hat modify it's configuration scripts, and they do not at all
> preclude the modification of those config scripts directly.

Those two statements that you split apart are necessarily linked.

Also, there's a lot of explanation that goes with the state of affairs
you discard as mere "perception" that is tending to get ignored here.


> 
> >So now I should learn yet another documentation system?  I don't even
> 
> Debian also stores quite a lot of documentation in /usr/share/doc,
> so this isn't a particularly Fedora "problem".  /usr/share/doc is *NOT* a
> Fedora weirdness.  I will tend to look in "man" first and then
> /usr/share/doc next.  I almost never look in info, except if I'm trying to
> do something clever with gnumake.

. . . except that in Debian, I can still look up basically everything I
need with man.  Debian similarly suffers from a problem of not making
/usr/share/doc an obvious source of information, but it doesn't suffer
from Fedora's problem of not making it an obvious source of information
*while making it the only source of information* for many common,
everyday things.  My point wasn't that such documentation exists in one
place and not another, but that it's necessary for simple crap like
figuring out how to configure the network in one place, but in the other
you can do it with manpages -- the more obvious and accessible access
method for documentation.


> 
> Admittedly though, I'd like "man ifcfg" to show the list of configuration
> directives I can put in ifcfg scripts.

That's the point I was trying to make.  That's it.  Nothing else.
There's no man ifcfg, there's no apropos results that will lead you to
such information, and the problem applies to more than just network
configuration files -- though they serve as a handy example.


> 
> >In Red Hat, sure, it's "standard".  It has also changed internally in
> >that time, and it's not "standard" for anyone else in the form used by
> 
> What do you mean by "changed internally"?  ONBOOT=yes, BOOTPROTO=static,
> IPADDR=, DEVICE=eth0, all these have been around since I started using Red
> Hat 3.0.3, IIRC.  At the very least they've been that way for so long that
> I don't remember them being any other way...  Yes, they probably have added
> things to it like "MAC=" to support ifrename...

I don't mean the file format, I mean the file names and locations.  I
don't actually know if the internal format of the config file has
changed -- I've just run into the problem of having files move around on
me between RH8 and FC3, and with documentation that I found when I
needed it being out of date.


> 
> >Fedora/RHEL today.  If you're never going to use anything but
> >Fedora/RHEL, that may be acceptable, but it gets kind of annoying when
> >workign in an environment that involves more than one distribution.
> 
> Dude, Kevin works in an environment where he has to support pretty
> much any distribution that someone is likely to install and then have
> problems with...  And he's good at it.  If he doesn't have a problem
> with it, there may not be a problem with it.  :-)

Good for him.  He's not the only person in the world that works with
multiple distributions, though, and some people find it inconvenient.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
print substr("Just another Perl hacker", 0, -2);