Re: Flag the presence of the DBUS dict VPN interface

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

On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 10:53 -0400, Dan Williams wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 15:36 +0100, Antony J Mee wrote:
> > Dan,
> > 
> > While there is a change-over period... Could we have a #define to flag
> > that the version of NetworkManager against which a plugin is compiled
> > can use the new dict based interface?
> > 
> > I have held back on committing the PPTP plugin changes for fear of it
> > breaking for people.  If there was a flag in place I could keep both the
> > old and the new code for now.
> 
> On the 0.6.x branch or on HEAD too?  

If 0.6.x is dict capable then yes and plugins could take advantage of it
if it is available in the installed NM.

> For HEAD/0.7 I'd like to remove the
> non-dict-based interface altogether.  But I think this is fine on the
> stable 0.6.x branch.

I agree the non-dict should go, but all other plugins will need to be
edited.   This just allows the plugins to make a smooth transition (so
and old NM can be used with a newer plugin).  But may be it's a bad idea
as it probably means plugins would need further edits later.
For now I've got an --enable-nm-vpn-dbus-dict option in the PPTP plugin
HEAD configure.in. Sorry for the noise.

In 0.7.x the current warning that a plugin is using the old interface
can easily be changed to issue an error instead.  I'd write a patch but
I'm not sure how one could make it a meaningful message that the applet
could report. An "IPConfig failed" seems too general.

tOnY

PS. I haven't backported all the PPTP plugin changes, and am not sure I
should.  Most of the changes are more than just simple fixes and I feel
a wrong backporting so much.  I guess I could just make various patched
tarballs instead - some package maintainers have helped to do this for a
couple of distros using NM 0.6.x already.