[bug-inetutils] Re: route

[Debarshi Ray]

>    nash, in particular, is quite an important part of this particular
>    distribution. Debian does not use nash nor does Fencepost have
>    NetworkManager for obvious reasons.
>
> These reasons are not obvious to me.  Could you tell me what they are?

A nash manual page
(http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/linuxcommand.org/man_pages/nash8.html)
describes it as follows:
       nash  is  a  very  simple script interpretor designed to be as small as
       possible. It is primarily designed to run simple linuxrc scripts on  an
       initrd image. Arguments to commands may be enclosed in either single or
       double quotes to allow spaces to be included in the  arguments.  Spaces
       outside  of  quotations  always  delineate  arguments, and so backslash
       escaping is supported.

It was (and probably is) used by Fedora and its derivatives (eg., Red
Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS) as part of the boot sequence. Other
distributions might be using it or something else. So if Debian is not
using nash, then Fencepost may not have libnl which nash pulls in
these days.

NetworkManager is targetted for desktop and laptop users, not servers.
So one can expect a XO from the OLPC to have it, or a default install
of GNOME (possibly KDE too) to have it, but not a shell server, like
Fencepost, to have it.