Re: netfilter 15/29: nf_conntrack: connection tracking helper name persistent aliases

[Pablo Neira Ayuso <pablo@netfilter.org>]

Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> [cc morphed to more interested parties]
> 
> On Thursday 2008-11-27 19:33, Patrick McHardy wrote:
> 
>> Jan Engelhardt wrote:
>>> On Thursday 2008-11-27 17:15, Patrick McHardy wrote:
>>>>    
>>>>    This patch adds the macro MODULE_ALIAS_NFCT_HELPER that defines a
>>>>    way to provide generic and persistent aliases for the connection
>>>>    tracking helpers.
>>> I wonder a bit. iptables is fine with loading ipt_%s (mapped to xt_%s),
>>> but conntrack requires an nfct-help-%s namespace and cannot use
>>> nf_conntrack_%s?
>>> Of course it makes sense to use a separate namespace - especially
>>> in light of the nf_conntrack_ prefix used by both helpers and
>>> protos, but I'm still asking.

It is not the same point. The xt_* aliases in iptables were introduced
to keep backward compatibility for iptables (old versions try to load
ipt_* or ip6t_* modules, as they don't know anything about xt_*. Of
course, this is no longer true for current iptables versions).

The reason why I introduced the nfct-help aliases is to avoid a change
in every request_module() invocation if we ever rename the helper files
to something like nf_conntrack_helper_*.c or whatever. If that happens
at some point, we will only have to change the MODULE_ALIAS_NFCT_HELPER
macro to point to the new name-space. This looks much cleaner to me.

>> Please CC the people that can actually answer this question.
>>
> Please set CC when running git-send-email :)

Burp!

-- 
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