Re: RFC: WPA-related API changes

[Tim Niemueller <tim niemueller de>]

Dan Williams wrote:
> Hi,

Hi.

> 2) Move higher-level key types to the applets, rather than keeping logic
> for them in NetworkManager.  Right now we have the constants for ASCII,

Am I right if I say that we just define two interfaces, one which is
nice for the machine which we will use for communication applet <->
NetworkManager and another which presents the user with the usual terms
so this will be the applet <-> user interface. So several different
terms in the user interface (ASCII key or hex key for wep) have a
unified form in the applet/NM interface (the n byte key + WEP type).
In the case this is how it is meant I'd vote for this.

> This would break existing stored preferences.

A conversion helper in the applet could fix this when the new applet is
run for the first time.

> The goal here is to move more user-provided details into the applets and
> to simplify NetworkManager itself, and provide an API that dovetails
> closely with the core system APIs like wireless-tools.

Will make it a lot easier and saves doubled work/code.

> I foresee moving more of this functionality (some of the "smart" bits)
> out to the applets and/or clients of NetworkManager rather than keeping
> it in NM itself.  As we try to build out the capability of NM past the
> original goals of seamless laptop/mobile use, this will get more and
> more important.

What should be considered is that moving more functionality to the
clients of NM raises the amount of work someone has to do for a new
client. Maybe some pieces could be tied together to an utils module or a
small lib to support this. This could also make it easier to keep
different clients in-sync. I'm not sure how well this would work with
clients for different desktops like Gnome and KDE. But I'd assume that
it would tremendously lower the work that has to be done to write an
applet for Xfce (which a friend suggested to me makes sense since he
doesn't want to have to use GConf and Gnome keyring on his Xfce machine).

Just my two cents.

	Tim

-- 
    Tim Niemueller <tim niemueller de>      www.niemueller.de
=================================================================
 Imagination is more important than knowledge. (Albert Einstein)