Re: [gentoo-dev] reason for dhcpcd in system profile ?

[Brad Laue <brad@gentoo.org>]

Kevyn Shortell wrote:
> I'd have to take a guess that Comcast in California has more DHCP cable
> customers than Canada has broadband customers.

Bell Canada's Sympatico service started out as the driving force behind 
the development of PPPoE clients under Linux, and the past two releases 
of both Mandrake and RedHat have in fact included built-in support and 
configuration frontends that enable a user to get online with minimal 
hassle.

Re: the sanity of choosing DHCP over PPPoE, the main perceived drawback 
is the dynamic IP. This is a management issue - PPPoE is as capable of 
delivering a static IP to the user as standard PPP is. As for 
encapsulation overhead, 1meg and 3meg service render this unnoticeable 
to the user (it may perhaps be 'less efficient' from a purist 
standpoint, but these are residential connections we're talking about).

At any rate, seeing as both PPPoE and DHCP are not as universal as 
ethernet (which requires the presence of such utilities as ifconfig in 
the basic system), and are both really fast emerges, wouldn't they 
contribute to a nice small base system? They seem more reasonable 
choices than some of the other suggestions I'm seeing.

> I agree that pruning the base system is probably a good idea, but why
> look at basic network components that atleast half of our users require
> in order to get their machine on the net?

Because they're options, and options are not defaults. :P

Brad


--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list