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

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 2005-07-25 at 17:08 -0400, Robert Love wrote:
> 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?

Brian Clark already had some stuff worked out for the interaction and
menu design specifics...

> 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.

Yes, my thoughts as well.

> 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.:

Yes, there's no way to be "clever" here and have it just work, there
needs to be config info sitting around somewhere.  I guess for now
that's the existing system config scripts, perhaps agumented by a nice
description of some type if the underlying OS doesn't provide one.

> 	(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);

I'd like to get davidz's comments on the proposed API here too...  But
first, what kind of "void *data" are we talking about?  In the end, we
probably just need to have NetworkManager know the title of the config,
and how to tell the underlying scripts to execute the config.  I was
envisioning something fairly mundane, comparable to what netapplet did
here with system scripts.

> 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.

I think we've at least written off PPP and ISDN as being completely
manual, since they require a load of configuration information already.
We also cannot detect when we have carriers on these at all points.

Dan