inetd Enhancements

[James Browning <jamesbrowning137%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hello NetBSD Community,

We are a team of senior CS students from Western Washington University, and we
are currently working a project to implement the enhancements to inetd as
described here:

https://wiki.netbsd.org/projects/project/inetd-enhancements/

We are sending this email for two purposes:
1. To notify the community that these changes are being worked on
2. To inquire about the ideal way to implement per-service configuration files
   in inetd.


We hope to have these changes implemented by the end of Spring, before we
graduate. We want to get community input, so that the changes we make will be
as convenient, helpful, and unintrusive as possible.

When it comes to adding per-service configuration files, our current plan is to
add a new configuration command, simlar to xinetd's "includedir", that allows
for specification of a per-service configuration directory. This will allow
users to use the existing inetd.conf along with a directory of their choice.
In addition we are considering also changing the syntax of the inetd
configuration file to be cleaner and easier to read (something more in line
with what xinetd does). We would like to know if this change would be worth it
at the cost of users potentially needing to change their inetd config files to
conform to the new format.

We are also wondering if it would preferable for us to modify the inetd.conf in
the source tree to include a default directory? If so, would it be ideal for us
to migrate service configurations from inetd.conf into their own files in the
new directory? Our reasoning behind making these changes is that it will clean
up the inetd.conf file, as well as allow for easier implementation of
per-service rate limiting.

The alternative to this, is adding the option for per-service config files, but
not adding or changing any existing files, and allowing the user to setup
per-service configuration at their own discretion.

We greatly appreciate your time and input.

Sincerely,
James Browning
Gabe Coffland
Alex Gavin
Solomon Ritzow