Manpages for DBus services? was Re: starting Fedora Server SIG

David Malcolm dmalcolm at redhat.com
Fri Nov 14 20:25:37 UTC 2008


On Fri, 2008-11-14 at 15:17 -0500, Martin Langhoff wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 1:22 PM, Jeremy Katz <katzj at redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, 2008-11-14 at 13:13 -0500, Martin Langhoff wrote:
> >> I agree with the desire to maintain only one tool. However, NM is
> >> extremely desktop oriented, and there seems to include no hint of an
> >> intention to support the complex setups that are possible with the old
> >> ifcfg infra.
> >
> > Really?  Most of the work over the past couple of years in NM seems to
> > be aimed at trying to support these cases as opposed to just the
> > "simple" desktop case
> 
> That's odd -- I've never seen any of it. Are there good examples of
> how you configure a server to do special stuff with it? Or a
> 'scripting network-manager' guide somewhere?
> 
> > The NetworkManager dispatcher stuff has existed forever and is all about
> > scripting.  Not necessarily pre-interface bringup, but post.  And
> > depending on scripting slows things down and makes it a lot harder to
> > have a deterministic view of what's been done.
> 
> Network-related events happen very seldom -- so scripting is a good
> fit. My ifup/ifdown experience is not dominated by bash startup time.
> 
> > And rather than focusing on nm-tool and exactly what it exposes, it's
> > probably more interesting to look at the dbus interfaces/daemon
> > capabilities.  Yes, I'll be one of the first to say it's painful to
> > write code interacting with dbus :-) -- but, it is very flexible and
> 
> And
>  - it's very far removed from the stuff that a unix sysadmin deals with
>  - it forces me to have a script running to listen to dbus events :-/
> 
>  > then as what the real use cases that people care about become clearer,
> > it's easier to write very lean, very specific tools to do what they need
> > as long as the backend and dbus interfaces are sufficient
> 
> I'm keen on learning more about the hooks and scriptability, mostly
> thinking of desktop cases. From a server perspective, running the nm
> daemon _plus_ running a daemon of my own to listen to dbus events...
> is not a winning proposition.
> 
> If the API design of NM is better laid out to do things in a more
> deterministic way, then great, let's learn those tricks and apply them
> to a solution that doesn't require fat daemons spinning in the bg all
> the time (running as root!), and that can hopefully be implemented in
> shell scripts or something similar.
> 

Brainstorming here, but do DBus services come with some form of
documentation format?  If so, it it possible to generate a man page per
service, and ship it in the rpm, as one step towards making DBus more
accessible to old-school Unix types?

Hope this helps
Dave




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