On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 11:40:28AM +1000, Alex 'AdUser' Z wrote:
> > Netplug, NetworkManager, inetd, xinetd, dhcpcd, and dhcp(client) to name a few already did the same work.
> > Netplug is possibly the lightest weight of them all and provides
> > connectivity device management as well as net connectivity service.

netplug and ifplugd provide essentially the same functionality; ifplugd
(written by Lennart several years ago) is the more widely used one as
far as I can tell, and there's a small version of it included in Busybox.

I'd be unsurprised if Lennart started thinking in terms of all the
projects he'd done and decided to roll everything that has some
association with initscripts/sysvinit/the "minimal" boot profile
into one package.

> FYI, there is (was?) another alternative:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=195365
>
> Known problems:
>
> * highly relies on initscripts package
> * almost undocumented, official wiki page is compilation of comments
> from sources.
> * used in only one distro (AltLinux)

http://git.altlinux.org/people/sbolshakov/packages/?p=etcnet.git;a=summary
That's about all I could read of www.altlinux.org/etcnet (said page
is Russian).

Last changes were the start of this year.

Reading the docs/ dir, I see that the READMEs are almost all "how to do
something you already know how to do, using this package".

etcnet.8 seems to be *almost* enough to get started;
etcnet-options.5 is almost enough to do something;
but the real documentation is in examples/.
Unfortunately, there's no example of how to do wireless via WPA.

I also see that it's meant to work with the hotplug scripts, and that it
amounts to "a different way to configure ifup".

Thanks,
Isaac Dunham