Re: wireguardnl: Go package for interacting with WireGuard via generic netlink

[Matt Layher <mdlayher@gmail.com>]

Understood and renamed to "wireguardctrl" to avoid confusion.

 > But more importantly, you shouldn't expose either the netlink or the 
xplatform API distinction to users ever. They should be given one 
interface, not three, and that one interface should be able to select 
the right thing in 100% of cases.

I can't say I agree with this under all circumstances.

While I will encourage the use of the unified interface, I read that 
there could be future work to allow the netlink interface to support 
something like multicast group notifications.  Would you plan on 
implementing the same functionality for the userspace interface?

I think there are potential use cases for selecting one or the other, 
but if this ends up being untrue, I can always push these packages 
behind a Go "internal/" directory at a later time to prevent outside 
imports.

- Matt


On 07/23/2018 11:12 AM, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
> Hi Matt,
>
>> This is super interesting and I actually did not discover it until after
>> I pushed the first few commits to my package.  I could see it making
>> sense to refactor my current package layout to something like three
>> packages:
>>
>> - wireguardnl: netlink-based communication
>> - wireguardcfg: text-based userspace configuration protocol communication
>> - wireguard: wrapper for both that detects the module in use and
>> seamlessly presents a unified interface
> No, that's really not a good approach at all. First of all, do not
> take the raw name "wireguard". That's going to cause a lot of
> confusion. It's really not appropriate.
>
> But more importantly, you shouldn't expose either the netlink or the
> xplatform API distinction to users ever. They should be given one
> interface, not three, and that one interface should be able to select
> the right thing in 100% of cases.
>
> Jason