[strongSwan-dev] Student is interested in strongswan.

[Martin Willi]

Hi,

> Why was separate starter and charon?

It has historical reasons. Initially it replaced some slow awk scripts
for pluto that parsed the configurations.

When we added IKEv2 support with charon, we had two daemons running.
starter took care of that, invoked the daemons and loaded the
appropriate configuration to the correct daemon.

> In my opinion, seem to most major functions of the STARTER reads the
> configuration file for the first time to apply.

As pluto is now gone and we handle IKEv1 and IKEv2 in a single daemon,
starter just passes over the configuration. We certainly could read the
configuration directly in charon now, but this has not been realized
yet.

Not to forget is that starter also acts as watchdog for the charon
process.

Regards
Martin