Re: [PATCH] removal of libdhcp

[Chris Lumens <clumens redhat com>]

>> libdhcp replaced libpump around F-5 or so.  It's been nothing but 
>
> What was wrong with libpump?

The initial motivation for replacing libpump with libdhcp was that
libpump had no support for IPv6 and that support was a requirement for
RHEL5.

> Well, nm has (or should have, it was a bit limited when I last fought it) 
> much more functionality than the installer's likely to need.

For now, true.  However the biggest advantage here is that it's the same
code the rest of the system uses.  That means we inherit all the same
bugs and all the same bug fixes.  We've had too much of our own
duplicate code that's only used by anaconda for too long.

> Bear in mind that one of the major critcisms of Anaconda is its 
> ever-expanding size. Folk were pretty unhappy with it arount RHL7 when some 
> folk were trying to create an alternative, for smaller systems. Back then, 
> I recall, one could install with 64 Mbytes of RAM.
>
> More recently _I_ was pretty unhappy when it took over 12 hours to upgrade, 
> in 256 Mbytes, from FC3 to FC5.
>
> I favour a simple dhcp client that does an adequate job over a complex, 
> over-featured alternative.

On the other hand, our requirements (especially from enterprise
customers) are increasing as well.  Networking and storage are two areas
in particular where we are seeing more and more unusual requests.  We
can either continue to write our own code to handle these things or use
what the rest of the system is using and not have to worry about
becoming experts at every single new thing.

- Chris