Re: nm-edit

[Antony J Mee <A J Mee ncl ac uk>]

Pat, this sounds fabulous! Hope you check in soon.

You might be interested in some of the code in the PPTP(and pppd)
configuration tool:
I took what had been written David Z. wrote for the vpnc plugin
and abstracted it a little further so as to be able to quickly add configs
for different types of connection.  It allows one to simply draw dialogs
in Glade and then have behaviour like groups of options in automatically
hidden/shown, expanded/collapsed expanders,  automatic handling of
control sensitivity, gconf naming/representation of options, import/export
from/to files, different sets of options based on for example the
value of a combo box and all this by simply declaring "sets of defaults".
The dialog in this screen shot is implemented with only couple of
dozen lines of mostly declarative code:
   http://www.flickr.com/photos/onlymee/161934943/
 

Robert Love wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-06-16 at 02:34 -0400, Pat Suwalski wrote:
>   
> > I actually think the current dialog isn't too bad. It has widgets for
> > all of the details. The only thing that would make senses is to space
> > the widgets based on logical groupings -- the order of the widgets
> > already hints at this. But that might just make it more confusing. The
> > Windows applet has all of the information spread over several tabs,
> > IIRC, so I think this is better as is. I'll think about it.
> >     
>
> Yah, given the mess of information, the current dialog is not half bad.
> One big thing is that it does not enforce sane configurations.
>   
I have written a generalised auth-dialog for the pptp/pppd plugin
that takes the "reparenting a widget" principle used in the nm-applet
auth-dialog a step further and uses loadable modules to easily provide
auth dialogs for many different auth types.

It searches in a plugin directory for everything that it can handle
though the caller can specify a list of "allowed auth types" as required.

It optionally handles the gnome keyring stuff transparently.

Would this be useful to you too?  I haven't checked it in yet.

I considered making the whole thing a shared library that any
process could use to acquire authentication information (partly
since Tim N. expressed worry at the amount of code repeated
across the VPN plugins)

Anybody think this might be useful elsewhere? Maybe even for
nm-applet?


tOnY