Re: NM dialup API

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Thu, 2007-04-19 at 13:18 +0300, Tambet Ingo wrote:
> Hello Will,
> 
> On 4/19/07, Will Stephenson <wstephenson kde org> wrote:
> > On Thursday 19 April 2007 10:07:31 Tambet Ingo wrote:
> > > There's no dialup API in the trunk because there will be none. Just as
> > > there's common API for wired and wireless devices, a dialup device
> > > will be just another device with exactly the same API and semantics as
> >
> > Hey, Tambet :)
> >
> > I made this realisation too after sending the first spec (sending something
> > always refreshes the parts actually thinking about it doesn't reach ;)).
> 
> Sweet, I'm glad we agree on it.

Whee, it got worked out without me having to write a long email saying
the same thing after I woke up this morning.  Tambet's right on.

> > > For configuration (of all device types, including dialup) see
> > > http://live.gnome.org/NetworkManagerConfiguration
> >
> > Excellent.  I hadn't found this page.  The KDE api I wrote to abstract NM and
> > other potential backends is spookily similar - especially having the
> > Connection bound to a type but not an instance of a device.  This will make
> > implementing a NM 0.7 backend for Solid easy.
> 
> Sounds like we have a good plan when two groups of people working
> independently come to a very similar conclusions (I can't take any
> pride on that though, I didn't even take part of the design) :)
> 
> > > The exact list of setting types is not spec'ed out yet.
> >
> > Is anyone working on turning this into a dbus spec yet?  I can help with this
> > if needed.

The D-Bus spec for the API that info-daemons (the things that pass
system-wide and user-scoped configuration to NetworkManager) is pretty
much spec'ed out, but comments are certainly welcome and appreciated.  I
sent a mail to the list back in Feb. that layed out my thoughts on the
NM <-> info-daemon API.

What Tambet is saying is unspec'ed are the exact key names and value
types.  I.e., there is a key "seen-bssids" that exists in the
"802-11-wireless" section scope, that is of type "array of char[6]" or
whatever.  We don't care where the info-daemon that provides that
configuration key/value gets it from, as long as it can coerce that
value into the specific D-Bus format that NM requires when you send the
save connections to it.

There are really 4 pieces to NetworkManager.  Only _1_ is really
desktop-environment specific:

1) NetworkManager itself - root-level daemon
2) system info-daemon - non-DE-specific, provides system-level
configuration (administrator specified settings (lock-down), or settings
the user has "published" to the rest of the system)
3) user info-daemon - provides user-specific configuration
4) GUI bits - obviously DE specific, allows the user to control NM, but
does not necessarily provide the configuration

It just happens that in the Gnome applet, we've combined 3+4 into the
applet for efficiency reasons.

Dan

> I have most of the infrastructure done for getting the configuration
> to NetworkManager. I'll attach the dbus introspection files to the
> mail. What still needs to be done is to define all the setting objects
> and all the possible fields in each setting and um... start using it.

Lets do it.

Dan