Re: PPP Dial up tool

[Matthew Garrett <mjg59-ddl srcf ucam org>]

On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 10:04:41AM +0200, Dmitry Koval wrote:

> 1. Control of the stage of dialing. That is user cannot see what is now
> going on and have no clue on the reason of failure.

It's potentially impossible for the user to know this anyway, depending 
on system setup.

> 2. Modem lights is not giving you simple way to select the connection to
> use.

Modem lights sucks for many reasons...

> 3. All above is applies to VPN connections too. The same set of tools
> should deal with both PPP and VPN. But modem-lights doesn't gives you an
> easy way to get up a pptpd connection for example.

In an ideal world, yes, this would be the case. At present, in 
implementation terms, the two are hugely different things (not helped in 
the slightest by the rather large range of unixy VPN tools). The Right 
Way, again, is for g-s-t to support this on a per distribution basis and 
let the "network connection applet" (or whatever) interact with that.

> 4. Diversification of these (g-s-t, modem lights) tools seems not good
> for me. I think there should be one place where user can create a new
> connection, select some connection and then dial out.

No. This would require large quantities of distribution-specific code in 
a panel applet - there's no significant point in having an applet that 
doesn't interact correctly with the system's own ideas about how PPP 
connections are set up.

> 5. And finally, following the trend of taking away technical details, we
> should avoid all stuff like ppp0, lock-file and so-on.

Indeed.

> To address the first issue as far as I see we should use pppd directly
> and avoid use of system scripts. I'm not sure is this is a good way,
> but doing so we could avoid requiring root password for creating new
> connection.

No, for the same reason as (4) is bad. Failing to integrate with the 
rest of the underlying system confuses people. On a Debian system, if I 
connect with the applet I should be able to disconnect by doing poff in 
a terminal.

> And since one application does all the work we can use notification area
> for controlling active connection.

Having thought about this, I'm not keen on the idea of using the 
notification area. For a start, it doesn't necessarily exist. Secondly, 
you probably want an icon per connection (otherwise you can't adequately 
show status, which defeats the point) and doing that in the notification 
area would probably result in a mass of tiny icons, all subtly different 
and all making it harder for you to tell if your print job is finished 
yet. Doing it in the panel is probably somewhat more sane.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 srcf ucam org