Re: [bug-inetutils] some notes on inetutils-1.8

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   however, the configuration was painful. i tried the easy way,
   turned off servers and clients and wrote --disable-syslogd=no
   etc. but that wasn't supported. thus i needed four lines to get the
   right selection.

The following should work to compile only syslogd, as per ./configure
--help, INSTALL and README.

./configure --disable-server --disable-clients --enable-syslogd

What `four lines' did you use?  Maybe something can be improved.

   further, why is encryption and authentication chained to kerberos?
   does this have to be this way? i'm not in that.

Do you have a different scheme in mind, what if so?  We like kerberos,
since it is a technically good solution.

   in the end, installation went fine (though i didn't test yet)
   except of syslogd not being installed to the target directory. i
   moved it manually.

What do you mean?

   i also miss a man page for syslog.conf. because you added extra
   symbols, there should be an own man page. not to say that there are
   so many versions of syslogd out on the net that the man page should
   mention the origin in the first paragraph. on the other hand, i
   believe that the info document is unique. however, ...

It isn't unique in the world of GNU, it is our prefered format for
documenting our programs, we can include a chapter in the man page for
syslogd if that is of help.  Would you like to submit such a patch?
But the main documentation will always be the info manual.

   possibly syslogd should better be moved to util-linux, because it
   isn't really an inet util (that it can forward doesn't compare it
   to tools like ftp and friends.)

Then non-Linux kernel using operating systems would not have a
improved version of syslogd, like for example GNU/Hurd, Solaris,
OpenBSD, et al.  syslogd is best fitted in inetutils, hence why we
provide it.

   hostname, instead, is already in the coreutils package.

The idea is to remove hostname from coreutils; if I recall it is not
compiled per default in coreutils anymore.

   if inetutils is intended to make net-tools redundant, i'd like to
   see route and others as well. but you have that on your list, i
   believe.

The intention of inetutils to provide all relevant network tools for
GNU systems and non-GNU systems.

   what about an iproute implementation (without berkeley-db
   dependency ;)

Would you like to write such a program for us?

   (btw., choosing -? for help and -h for hop on the syslogd command
   line is not a good choice in my eyes. please rethink!)

You will need to have a stronger argument than "I don't like it".