Bug 264309

I can fix the scripts in yast2-printer (but not in yast2-core)
because I made most of them.

Of course they must exit with an error (special non-zero exit code)
because without netcat the test cannot be done successfully.

Michal,
how do you pefer it to be done?
Should I work directly in SVN or should I send you fixed scripts?
Would you fix the dialogs so that an appropriate "missing netcat"
message is shown to the user so that it is clear for the user
when a test failed only because of a missing test-tool
and not because of a real problem?


By the way:
Is a RPM "Recommends" sufficient to get netcat installed by default
or are additional entries in the patterns necessary?

> how do you pefer it to be done?
> Should I work directly in SVN or should I send you fixed scripts?

I prefer to send changes to me

>> Would you fix the dialogs so that an appropriate "missing netcat"
>> message is shown to the user so that it is clear for the user
>> when a test failed only because of a missing test-tool
>> and not because of a real problem?

I think disabled button with text ("to enable this functionality install netcat package") will be fine. Yes, I will do that

Reccomends is enought

yast2-core-2.15.7 only Recommends netcat.rpm and will return [".install.netcat.rpm"] as the host list if it cannot find the required rpm. The application can translate this to whatever it pleases.

Created attachment 131669 [details]
remote-tools.tar.bz2

This archive contains new versions of

listen_remote_ipp
test_remote_ipp
test_remote_lpd
test_remote_novell
test_remote_smb
test_remote_socket

Michal,
the new scripts are in attachment #131669 [details].

I test for all executables except those in the coreutils RPM
(i.e. I assume the coreutils RPM is installed).

If exit code >= 10 then an executable is missing.

The exact exit code describes which executable is missing
(but I simply abort at the first missing executable):
#         10 ping not executable (no iputils RPM installed?)
#         11 netcat not executable (no netcat RPM installed?)
#         12 fuser not executable (no psmisc RPM installed?)
#         13 mktemp not executable (no mktemp RPM installed?)
#         14 sed not executable (no sed RPM installed?)
#         15 lp not executable (no cups-client RPM installed?)
#         16 smbclient not executable (no samba-client RPM installed?)
#         17 nprint not executable (no ncpfs RPM installed?)

netcat is still required by yast2-core, but there are plans to remove it.
Martin?

Johannes, is it possible to replace use of netcat binary with /dev/tcp ?

No.

Reason (as far as I know):
bash cannot listen like "netcat -l ..." can.

Details:
bash can read from a remote socket via /dev/tcp but this
means that there must be already a remote process running
to which the bash can connect.
If there is no such remote process, the read will fail
(with something like EOF).
What bash cannot do is to bind to a local socket and
then just wait and listen until a remote process
connects to it.

fixed in yast2-printer-2.16.7
netcat is not strictly required, only recommended. In case is installed or not, buttons that runs script used netcad are enabled/disabled by this condition

Comment 6: no, netcat is only recommended (since comment 3).

But anyway, for yast2-core-2.16.30 I replaced netcat by /dev/tcp.

*** Bug 746760 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***