Re: NetworkManager

[Seth Nickell <snickell gmail com>]

> I don't mean to be harsh, but I expect more of a standard, [1] the GST
> backends are almost in a 1.0 stage, support lots of distros, will be
> distributed separatedly after gnome 2.8 (and gst 1.0) and will be
> proposed to fdo. They are thought for this kind of problems, why not
> using them?

Hi Carlos, I don't want to give the impression that we've ignored
g-s-t. I looked at the backends a few months ago (not connected w/
NM), but didn't really consider them for NM because the aims appeared
quite different.

AFAICT, and please correct me if I'm wrong, g-s-t attempts to provide
a constant interface over distro-specific network setting/policy
layers.

In contrast, NetworkManager supplants the distro-specific
setting/policy layers. It becomes the setting/policy layer. One goal
of NetworkManager is to (at least in the desktop realm, but hopefully
more generally in the future) take "networking" out of the realm of
"distro specific icing".

I will boldly say that every major distros networking policy layer is
a hacky script. Moreover, the policies are geared toward servers
rather than desktops & laptops. The g-s-t approach is a good bandaid,
NetworkManager is more like invasive surgery: its painful, the patient
might die on the table, but it might be the only way to heal the wound
;-)

I think its reasonably open for debate whether "invasive surgery" is
called for here, but at least I hope this helps explain why we haven't
used the g-s-t backends: the goals are quite different. Also, the
distro specific stuff in NM is pretty small and should only shrink
with time (for example, I think it would be pretty reasonable to say
"NM will use such and such a dhcp implementation", or just include
DHCP support in NM itself). At present its about 200 (very simple, and
half the lines are comments) lines of C per distro.

In more concrete terms, the NM backends wrapper very different things
than g-s-t backends as a result of the differences in goal. For
example, we don't wrapper "ifup" but directly call "ifconfig", "ip"
and kin.

> This is how autogen.sh ends for me:
> <output>
> 
> checking for /etc/mandrake-release... no
> checking for /etc/redhat-release... no
> checking for /etc/fedora-release... no
> checking for /etc/gentoo-release... no
> checking for /etc/debian_version... yes
> Your distribution(debian) is not yet supported!  (patches welcome)
> </output>

Oops! Bug in our configure.in, now fixed, thanks. Though, I think the
point that NetworkManager is very immature is fair. However, being
facetious I note that g-s-t just got support for WEP keys today, so
its not like it was sitting ready and waiting exactly what we needed
*grin*

> And in the TODO file I can read this:
...snip bad RH specific parts of TODO...

Yes, we should probably make our own settings file for the static IP
stuff rather than recycling the RH-specific way of doing it. In our
defense, we haven't really started thinking about the static IP stuff,
just keeping the TODO as a list of thoughts and prompts.

-Seth