Re: Slight flame at NM

[Timothy Murphy <tim birdsnest maths tcd ie>]

On Sat 26 Mar 2005 17:29, Robert Paskowitz wrote:

> NM does not really care what drivers you use, whether they are in the
> kernel proper or not, especially since most wireless drivers are not in
> the kernel.

Sigh.
I thought I made it clear that it is me, not NM,
that dislikes drivers outside the kernel.
Life is too short to spend time on extraneous modules,
unless they are absolutely essential.

This is purely my feeling - I may well be in a tiny minority
(though I doubt it).

> Also, the orinoco drivers to which you were linked are from the same
> branch as those in the kernel tree, but are more recent, since gettign
> stuff into the tree takes time.

An inordinate time, in the case of orinoco_cs.
In fact I did know that more recent versions of the driver support scanning,
as the author (Mike Kershaw) kindly told me.

I'm also interested in Bluetooth, and developments there
get into the kernel (or one of the kernel patches at www.kernel.org)
almost as soon as they see the light of day.
I suspect the WiFi author is overly cautious.

> Furthermore, NM should not gracefully exit when no card is found, since
> it's job is to sit around and be ready to grab you a connection with any
> network card, present or future. Perhaps you have a wired card in your
> machine, or perhaps in an hour you will pop in another pcmcia card which
> does work.

Sorry, NM hangs with my Orinoco card.
No application should hang.
If it knows it cannot connect with the card in use,
it should exit from that phase.
The windmill can still keep spinning.

Also, as I said, the documentation -
which should exist, however rudimentary -
should warn you, "This program is unlikely to work
unless your card + driver supports scanning,
which you can test by running the program
	iwlist eth0 scanning
(with appropriate interface in place of eth0".

You see, that only took me a couple of minutes to write,
while the program must have taken days if not weeks to develop.

There is no excuse in my view for offering programs -
especially those that appear in Fedora Core -
without any documentation.

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland