Re: [patch] Support Debian's resolvconf

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Sun, 31 Jul 2005, Olivier Blin wrote:
> Colin Walters <walters verbum org> writes:
> 
> > What we want to do is get to the point where NM is installed everywhere,
> > from servers to desktops to laptops.  It should be *the* networking API.
> > That way even on servers or desktops, applications can e.g. listen for
> > D-BUS signals on network availability and react accordingly.
> 
> Great, are you gonna duplicate all the ifup/down scripts, the network
> service, the wireless-tools, and wpa_supplicant to achieve that?
> It's nice to be able to know and modify the status of the network
> using a daemon and D-Bus, but what you're doing currently with
> NetworkManager is rewriting all the existent programs.

Yes.  That is, more or less, the point.  What we do _not_ want is some random 
front-end to ifup/ifdown like Red Hat's system-config-network currently is.  You 
simply do not get the kind of error reporting, user interaction, and feedback 
that is required for the networking experience that we want to have.

> Furthermore, NetworkManager isn't yet able to save its configuration
> in the standard ifcfg-* files, thus it doesn't integrate with the
> network initscript. So, it breaks backward compatibility, while it
> could be possible to re-use the current configuration system. Or maybe
> you have some very good reason to store this in gconf instead of plain
> old text files.

Again, that's that point of NetworkManager, that it doesn't interact with the 
current scripts and config files.  It's simply not supposed to do that, for a 
variety of reasons.  The current network scripts are not dynamic.  They do not 
allow for multiple wireless networks with advanced configuration details easily.  
For example, if you are using WPA right now, you need to have your config 
information in at least two places and you can't really use a GUI client to do 
it.  We're supposed to be making this easy and consolidating this configuration 
information.  Furthermore, the user shouldn't have to even enter half of this 
stuff, and they shouldn't have to touch a config file to do it either.  That's 
what GUIs are for (in our mobil-user scenario).  I recognise the necessity of 
server-type configuration, but you have to start somewhere.

> It also makes impossible to use common commands such as ifup, and
> there is no command-line alternative for NetworkManager now. I know it
> would be possible, but there is none for now.
> For now, there's no solution to edit configuration with a text editor,
> that's stopper for servers.
> It also leads people that want to use the network service for some
> interfaces to maintain two different configuration spaces for network,
> which isn't really suitable.

Well, at this point we're not aiming at servers.  In the future, yes, but not 
right now.  The current "mandate" of NM is essentially mobile laptop users.  
Moving forward, we hope to generalize the structure of NetworkManager to take 
advantage of more of these things, and to work with more network devices.

Dan