Re: Setting hostname while spawning pasta

[Stefano Brivio <sbrivio@redhat.com>]

Hi Danish,

On Thu, 9 May 2024 12:30:42 +0530
Danish Prakash <danish.prakash@suse.com> wrote:

> Hello
> 
> I was having a discussion with a colleague of mine on how `pasta` when invoked
> independently drops you in a new user and network namespace and how that causes
> some folks to not realize what has happened especially because there's no cue
> as to what transpired. This is not uncommon though, because a lot of
> times, folks having
> issues with pasta while running it with podman, tend to invoke pasta
> directly to debug.
> 
> I interacted with Stefano regarding this and he told me that pasta
> already detaches
> the UTS namespace and so in order to address this issue, I propose
> that we set the hostname
> as part of `pasta_spawn_cmd()`.Doing this would provide users with a
> clear visual indication that
> they are in a new user namespace (among other ns but that won't be
> indicative here) and avoid
> issues similar to the aforementioned.
> 
> I'm looking to gather more opinions on how this change, if
> implemented, would affect the
> functionality. Looking forward to the discussion.

...I just realised one thing, probably solvable, while trying out some
stuff with pasta on two different machines: if I didn't have the
original hostname in the prompt, I would have had some issues telling
them apart.

But we could still retain the existing hostname and prefix with
something like 'pasta-on-' (sure, we would need to truncate at 63
characters, but it shouldn't be a common case). What do you think?

That would also help when you're running pasta-in-pasta-in-pasta-in...
(or at least when I am running it ;)).

Because usually I notice that I'm in a pasta-spawned terminal by
looking at the prompt: I'm "root", but colours didn't change.

What I can't tell from the prompt, though, is at what "level" I'm at
(at least pasta-in-pasta is something I try very commonly to reproduce
pasta's behaviour with particular network setups). Having
root@pasta-on-pasta-on-machine would be a nice plus.

-- 
Stefano