Re: [PATCH 2/4] alfred: Allow operating without any interface specified

[Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>]

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On Sunday, 2 January 2022 20:01:47 CET Marek Lindner wrote:
> On Sunday, 2 January 2022 15:20:20 CET Sven Eckelmann wrote:
> > This now causes the "--force" option (+its storage in the globals data
> > structure) to be completely useless. 
> 
> Why would global->force be useless ? The alfred_server() function still uses 
> the global->force state to determine if globals->mesh_iface is configured 
> correctly.

Ok, you are right about mesh_iface. But the patch missed to adjust the manpage 
to clarify this.

> > I would prefer to have this handling still be there when
> > !list_empty(&globals->interfaces).
> 
> To be honest, I hadn't fully understood what use case global->force is trying 
> to address. What do you have in mind ? Checking for list_empty() will require 
> alfred to be always started with an interface configured while alfred could be 
> used without any interface at all and operate as local data storage between 2 
> processes on the same system or the interface could be configured at a later 
> time (via unix socket).

No, I wasn't talking about list_empty() but about !list_empty(). You removed 
the first block because you want to have have alfred started without any 
interface - fine with that.

But the default behavior of alfred in the past was to first check if the 
selected interfaces make sense and then return an error if there was a problem 
to open them. The force option basically ignored any error when there was an 
interface not ready yet. But the patch completely removed the chance to pre-
check the interfaces on startup.

> > And why is it necessary to not open the sockets on startup when interfaces
> > are already given?
> 
> The main while loop calls netsock_reopen() in each round which will open all 
> necessary sockets (unless I am mistaken). My guess is that this was added when 
> the ALFRED_CHANGE_INTERFACE call was added. Therefore, the netsock_open() call 
> is somewhat redundant unless alfred is meant to always require an interface at 
> startup time and alfred is meant to bail out whenever that configured interface 
> isn't available at startup time.

See above. The situation I had in mind was:

* force not enabled
* an interface given to the process
* interface cannot be used by alfred

Kind regards,
	Sven

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