Hi all,

(sent to nbd-general mailinglist plus package maintainers of NBD for
various non-Debian distributions that I know of. Except for arch, since
they make it impossible to get at maintainers' email addresses without
an account, so meh)

One of my goals for NBD in Debian's next release is to write a systemd
"nbd-generator", which would generate a unit file for NBD devices
similar to how systemd handles fstab. This was after a suggestion from
systemd upstream that this would be the best way forward.

I've come to the conclusion, however, that to implement this properly I
would really need to have an actual config file for nbd. I do have
something along those lines for Debian (really a shell script snippet
that the init script sources, and based upon which it generates the
proper command line), but I'm not sure it really fits the job, and I
would want to migrate it to something that nbd-client would parse
itself.

One of my design goals for nbd-client is that it should remain as small
as possible, so that it can usefully fit inside an initramfs without
bloating it too much. This mean I don't want to link it to libglib like
I do for nbd-server. Therefore, this configuration file isn't going to
be a .ini-style configuration file (like the nbd-server one is), but
something easy to parse in a few lines of C (I could do some flex/bison,
but again, meh -- there's no need, really).

I'm currently thinking of having something along the lines of:

nbd0 nbdserver.host.name exportname [options]

where the options field would be optional, and would contain extra
command-line options that we then parse with getopt. Comments would be
supported in the usual UNIX manner (with # designating "from here until
the EOL marker is a comment"). Note the absense of the -N and/or the
absense of the port; but since 3.10/3.11 we don't support port-based
exports anymore, so that's not really an issue.

Once that file exists, the idea is to modify nbd-client so that it would
support

nbd-client nbd0

to connect nbd0 with the info in the config file. After that, connecting
them at boot time should become much easier.

Thoughts?

-- 
It is easy to love a country that is famous for chocolate and beer

  -- Barack Obama, speaking in Brussels, Belgium, 2014-03-26

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