[rfc] modems, isdn, and other relics of the stone age.

[Robert Love <rml novell com>]

So.  I want to investigate tackling modems and such.  Let's say anything
that dials or anything that uses PPP.

Anyone have any thoughts on the matter?  Existing design?  Fully working
code?

No?

Here is what I was thinking.

My overarching theme is to get modems working with as little work as
possible, leveraging as much outside code as possible.  Since
distributions tend to support their own PPP setup and dialers, we should
use that infrastructure.

To that end, my idea is

	(a) Add "Dial Up" menu to the applet.

	(b) This menu is populated via a backend call that returns
	    a list of dialing profiles/interfaces/whatever.  E.g.:

		VPN Connections		>
		-------------------------
		Dial Up			>
						CompuServe (Modem) ...
						CompuServe (ISDN) ...
						VPN Remote Dial Up ...
		-------------------------

	(c) Clicking the item invokes a function in the backend that
	    runs the dialer or does whatever is needed.

That's it.  The API changes would look like

	typedef struct {
		char *name;	/* unique */
		void *data;	/* distro-specific data */
		/* ... */
	} NMDialUpConfig;

	NMDialUpConfig * nm_system_device_init_dial_up (void);
	void nm_system_device_dial (NMDialUpConfig *dial);

It is not dynamic, but unless we want to make NM into a dialer and ISDN
subsystem and all that, we don't necessarily need it to be.

Thoughts?

	Robert Love