Re: Proposal: NetworkManager for GNOME 2.18.

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Tue, 2006-10-03 at 11:40 -0400, Robert Love wrote:
> Let's try this again.
> 
> I'd like to start the discussion on getting NetworkManager--more
> explicitly, its GNOME-based applet, nm-applet--into GNOME 2.18.
> 
> 
> Tell me about NetworkManager without using big words.
> 
> NetworkManager is the future of Linux networking.  Red Hat, SUSE, and
> others have adopted NetworkManager as their networking solution.
> NetworkManager supports Ethernet, PPP, and all sorts of wireless network
> connections.  It also supports VPNs.  The addition of NetworkManager to
> GNOME will improve the user experience and overall desktop usability.
> 
> 
> There is both a daemon and a client?  Explain.
> 
> The daemon is desktop-agnostic.  It requires glib, HAL, and DBUS.  It
> runs as root, at the system-level, and enforces no policy, stores no
> settings, and maintains no state across sessions.
> 
> The client, conversely, is policy-rich.  It provides a user interface,
> allowing user control.  There are currently two clients: nm-applet,
> GNOME's client, and KNetworkManager, KDE's client.  There is also plans
> for a command-line client.
> 
> 
> You are asking to merge just nm-applet?
> 
> Yes, I think that makes the most sense.  In the same way we have GNOME
> Volume Manager in the Desktop, and HAL as an implicit requirement, I
> propose putting nm-applet in the Desktop and have NetworkManager (or
> anything else implementing its DBUS API) as an implicit requirement.

Are you then proposing three separate tarball releases?
Would you then split NM into three separate CVS modules?
Where would each of those modules live?  (I can't imagine
KDE being excited about KNetworkManager being hosted on
Gnome CVS.)

If the daemon is to live somewhere neutral, like fd.o,
does it have translatable strings that we'll need to
worry about?


On another note, I'd very much appreciate if either you
or Dan could send some detailed information to the docs
list (gnome-doc-list gnome org) about how it works, how
users interact with it, under what conditions users might
have problems, etc.  Pointers to existing documentation
from Red Hat or Novell would be great, if any exists.

--
Shaun