From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:
time-out
n 1: a brief suspension of play; "each team has two time-outs left"
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (18 March 2015) [foldoc]:
timeout
A period of time after which an error condition is raised if
some event has not occured. A common example is sending a
message. If the receiver does not acknowledge the message
within some preset timeout period, a transmission error is
assumed to have occured.
This is useful for distributions, where the stability of interface names should
be preseved after an upgrade of systemd. So when some specific release of the
distro is made available, systemd defaults to the latest & greatest naming
scheme, and subsequent updates set the same default. This default may still
be overriden through the kernel and env var options.
A special value "latest" is also allowed. Without a specific name, it is harder
to verride from meson. In case of 'combo' options, meson reads the default
during the initial configuration, and "remembers" this choice. When systemd is
updated, old build/ directories could keep the old default, which would be
annoying. Hence, "latest" is introduced to make it explicit, yet follow the
upstream. This is actually useful for the user too, because it may be used
as an override, without having to actually specify a version.
With this we can stabilize how naming works for network interfaces. A
user can request through a kernel cmdline option or an env var which
scheme to follow. The idea is that installers use this to set into stone
(a very soft stone though) the scheme used during installation so that
interface naming doesn't change afterwards anymore.
Why use env vars and kernel cmdline options, and not a config file of
its own?
Well, first of all there's no obvious existing one to use. But more
importantly: I have the feeling that this logic is kind of an incomplete
hack, and I simply don't want to do advertise this as a perfectly
working solution. So far we used env vars for the non-so-official
options and proper config files for the official stuff. Given how
incomplete this logic is (i.e. the big variable for naming remains the
kernel, which might expose sysfs attributes in newer versions that we
check for and didn't exist in older versions — and other problems like
this), I am simply not confident in giving this first-class exposure in
a primary configuration file.
Fixes: #10448
This imports the wiki page for predictable interface names. I think it's
useful to preserve history here because it's a contentious subject, and
it's useful to know when what happened.
Patches are shown on github with a fixed width (no matter how wide the window
is). When line numbers are high (we have some files with 5 digit line numbers),
the diff does not fit, and horizontal scrolling must be used when viewing the
patch. This is super annoying. Let's reduce the width a bit. I think 109 is
still very wide, but at least the github issue should be alleviated.
