Re: NM tidbits

[Robert Love <rml novell com>]

On Wed, 2006-01-25 at 14:21 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:

> 1) What was the rationale for Enable Networking again?  If we have that,
> do we really need Enable Wireless?  If there's a need for Enable
> Networking, I'd rather remove Enable wireless and just have one.  Two
> seem redundant.  Internally, one essentially calls "sleep" and the other
> actually disables wireless, no?

'Enable Networking' does supersede 'Enable Wireless' in all cases except
where you want to disable scanning, but not all networking.  I think
this is a valid use case.

Disabling all networking has two primary uses: As a "lock down" or
"flight mode" and in the case of performing a clean disconnect.  A clean
disconnect might be nice if using a docking station, for example.

So we definitely need an 'Enable Networking' option, because I think we
really need to give users a way to cleanly disconnect, and (legally) we
will eventually need a "flight mode."

But "Enable Wireless" is nice for the scanning case.  Albeit, I admit
that the two are a bit redundant.

What do you think?

> 2) I'm thinking 0.6 release within the next 2 weeks.  Sound good in
> general (and wrt SUSE 10.1)?  What are the major bugs to get fixed
> before then?  Do you want to man the release stuff?  I'd like to get
> some new content on the website too.  General push for excitement, more
> docs, etc for 0.6.

I will happily man the release 100%.  0.6 sounds good.  I think we are
just about ready.  Update website, sing a song on the blog, and so on to
light a fire under everyone and get them excited.

Brainstorming TODO before 0.6:

        - I think we could get WPA Enterprise off with little effort,
        no?  If so, no reason not to include that for 0.6.
        
        - madwifi and WPA.
        
        - RH #169372 and GNOME #323729.  I _think_ I fixed this a couple
        weeks ago.  The code is in CVS.
        
        - Some people have suggested to me that NM is a regression over
        straight wpa_supplicant, because wpa_supplicant can auto-detect
        ciphers and even WPA version.  So all of our options are
        excessive.  If accurate, apparently we can just not specify the
        details and wpa_supplicant will get it right via auto-detection.
        Allowing the fine tuning is fine, but if the default is just
        "auto" and that works, all the better.
        
        - I have seen some bugs that ad-hoc creation does not work, but
        this is probably drivers.

Anything else?

	Robert Love