Re: [ANNOUNCE] ModemManager (for GSM and CDMA)

["Tambet Ingo" <tambet gmail com>]

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 12:30 AM, Roberto Majadas
<roberto majadas openshine com> wrote:
> I'm Roberto Majadas (mobile-manager developer). I was reading your spec
> about modem-manager. It's really interesting but i think you are trying
> to implement the same thing that we've implementated.
>
> Mobile Manager has a public and documentated Dbus API[1]. It support
> many features like pin/puk management, device and status information,
> plug & play support, device plugin system....
>
> At the moment we support this devices :
>  - Huawei
>  - Option
>  - Nozomi
>  - Sierra
>  - Novatel
>  - Usb devices
>  - Bluetooth devices
>
> And in the future we'll support more devices.
>
> About the programming language that should be written a daemon. Yeah C
> it's a good option in fact (i'm C programmer). But there are many, many,
> many situations easier to resolve using python in this case. The GPRS/3G
> devices sometimes are evils ;), belive me, i was working on it the last
> two years :). In this way MobileManager only depends of python,
> python-dbus and python-gobject (5-10Mb in memory)
>
> At the moment we use wdial to establish the ppp connection but we can
> change it and use NM ppp system.
>
> We are open to talk everything and we are open to colaborate ;)

Again, all this work has been done to support other modem driving
solutions (like mobile-manager). There were two missing pieces: It
wasn't possible to use other languages than C before, which is solved
by writing code to NetworkManager to talk to modems over dbus. Another
thing that was missing was the dbus API. Now that is defined as well
(but is open for changes). There are other (from mobile-manager)
interested parties and everyone has their own API. NM shouldn't try to
implement all of them, so we needed to define something that everyone
can target. ModemManager that I just announced is just one
implementer. As you say, it takes time to write a good one, and using
existing programs (which need to adapt the API changes, or just
provide another set of API to be integrated with NM) we have a
complete solution today.

The way to collaborate (to integrate with NM) is to try to implement
the API I've defined, and give me feedback on what should change
there.

Tambet