Re: PPTP Plugin Updated -- Ver. 0.6.9 Generally PPP capable?

[David Zeuthen <davidz redhat com>]

Hi,

On Tue, 2006-06-06 at 10:40 +0200, Tim Niemueller wrote:
> Cesar Cardoso schrieb:
> > 2006/6/2, Antony J Mee <A J Mee ncl ac uk>:
> > 
> >>  This is a totally general PPPD plugin...
> > 
> > So I imagine that now we can believe that in some time in the future
> > NM will make those dialers (gkdial, gnome-ppp etc) obsolete? Yay! :)
> 
> For this see http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SummerOfCode/2006/TimNiemueller
> 
> I'm working on it :-)

This sounds like very interesting work, thanks a lot for looking into
this!

As you may or may not know Matthew Garrett (mjg59) is working on
teaching HAL about Bluetooth devices including providing methods for
discovering, pairing and querying a Bluetooth device for what services
it provide. 

With this work it's very likely that device objects with hal
capabilities such  'serial.modem.hayescompatible' etc. might show up in
the hal device tree with links so you can infer what devices it stems
from. Then detecting the device is simply a matter of querying HAL.

So I think it make sense to use HAL as the mechanism to discover devices
and some generic desktop daemon / gizmo to discover Bluetooth devices.
After all, Bluetooth has other devices that NetworkManager might not be
interested in. Such as input devices, PDA's, printers and what not.
We've also discussed today on #hal to teach HAL about IR devices and
some of these might provide dial-up capabilities as well.

Also, for supporting good old serial line modems (those you can attach
to COM1: :-) and USB modems there is some (partly easy, partly hard)
work we can do in HAL to make this easier and fit in better with other
services that wants to use e.g. the serial port. Basically I think, for
dumb buses like serial and parallel port, we need some kind of UI gizmo
that can poke HAL to scan for modems or just force HAL to say "there's a
Hayes compatible modem on COM1:". We also need this in HAL for
integration with serial port smart card readers and serial port UPS
devices.

I've Cc'ed Matthew on this mail as he can explain much better what his
plans regarding Bluetooth and IR are.

    David