Re: Planned GNOME Shell UI changes (was Re: String and UI Change Announcement)

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 2011-01-10 at 13:47 -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-01-10 at 18:52 +0100, Giovanni Campagna wrote:
> 
> > >  * A native network indicator applet will be added that works with
> > >    NetworkManager 0.9 will be landing. (So don't screenshot the
> > >    current nm-applet which doesn't even have symbolic icons for
> > >    the panel)
> > 
> > I'm not sure it will make it in 3.0. I have alpha quality code for that
> > indicator (better than the one I posted half a year ago), but I cannot
> > really test it since it depends on libnm-glib 0.9 with rm-userset, which
> > is incompatible with NetworkManager 0.8.990.
> > You could run the jhbuilt daemon but, ignoring security issues, is not
> > really workable, given that it is not compatible with nm-applet and does
> > not load configs from either GConf or rhcfg-plugin.
> > Also, a lot of features are missing, like asking for a wireless key or
> > creating adhoc connections.
> 
> The way I see it, someone who is using GNOME 3 with NetworkManager 0.8
> will certainly have the option of using the old nm-applet icon. This
> probably is going to be the configuration most people will need to use
> if they've jhbuilt GNOME 3 on top of an existing distro and don't want
> to go out of their way to replace the system NetworkManager daemon.
> 
> But NetworkManager 0.9 has the features we need to properly integrate
> with our plans for GNOME 3, so that's what anything we implement in the
> UI should be targeting.
> 
> I'll let Dan Williams follow up here to describe where that is currently
> and how it relates to the items you mention above.

I'm finishing up a patch to NM for "AddAndActivate", which given an
incomplete connection dict (or even just an object path to an AP or
WiMAX NSP from the scan list) will fill in all the missing connection
details for you, add that connection to backing storage, and then start
activating it.  That's a huge win for developers since it removes about
50 steps that used to be necessary to connect to an AP.  (Well, except
for 802.1x and GSM where we need additional information like the EAP
details or the APN, but NM would still fill in the rest of the stuff for
you).

To decrease instability in git master I've kept all the huge NM 0.9 API
changes in rm-userset until they are "mostly done".

The next steps for merging rm-userset to master are:

1) finish writing a bunch of testcases for AddAndActivate
2) complete the network-manager-applet port over to NM 0.9 to show any
holes that might be left in the NM 0.9 API
3) add the user-connection import code to the applet to move existing
user connections from GConf to system settings
4) merge rm-userset

I'm very optimistic that will all happen this week, including your GOI
patch for libnm-glib (thanks!).  At that point we can also discuss ways
to make the libnm-glib API easier to bind for GOI, where I think the
usage of dbus-glib types as GObject property types is making things
slightly harder.

Cheers,
Dan