Branching NetworkManager: stable & HEAD

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

Hi all,

So we've come to the point where we probably need to branch NetworkManager into
a stable branch and HEAD.  First off, dbus 0.30 has big changes to the dbus API,
and current NM seems to have settled down quite a bit.

There are a few large-ish things sitting around in the queue however, which
probably should get backported to stable if we branch:

1) Integrated VPN support - Add submenu to the panel applet for VPN connections
and add support for different VPN clients.  Colin Walters has done some work on
this, but it's currently on pause.  Main idea here is to have a unified D-BUS
interface for VPN clients, and we wrap each VPN client in a D-BUS aware wrapper.
NM would thus communicate only with the D-BUS aware wrapper and not have to care
about the intricacies of every VPN client.

2) WPA/ieee802.11i support - This seems fairly high on the priority list at the
moment, but requires some work.  First, wpa_supplicant (which seems to be the
best option here) needs patches to put it in "dumb" mode, where it is controlled
wholly by NetworkManager and doesn't try to do anything smart.  For example, it
has its own config file, it keeps its own WEP/WPA keys, it can't do
passphrase->key hashing, it does its own scanning, etc.  It communicates with
clients through a Unix socket, so we'd need to patch wpa_supplicant for "dumb"
mode and then do the glue for NetworkManager to tell wpa_supplicant exactly what
to do.

3) Peter Jones' latency patch - pjones has done a patch which greatly speeds up
most stuff in NetworkManager that requires waits, ie association, connection,
some bits of scanning, etc.  This needs a bit more work and needs a bit of
refinement, but its pretty damn good and the results are awesome.  It touches a
lot of code though, and therefore I don't feel comfortable dumping it in the
"stable" branch right now.

So, that's what needs to get done in the near future.  And here's what I
propose:

a) tag a "stable" branch for NetworkManager 0.3.4.  NM 0.3.x will continue to be
our "stable" series.
b) continue development on HEAD as NetworkManager 0.4.x.  Let John Palmieri,
David Zeuthen, and I loose on porting to D-BUS 0.3 and HAL 0.5.  Hopefully get
this done for Fedora Core 4 Test 1.
c) Backport necessary fixes from HEAD to stable, provided the fixes don't
destabilize 0.3.x (duh).

Comments?  Bill/Tom P/John P/Colina, thoughts from you guys?

Dan