couple of questions about the NM TODO

[Bryan Clark <bclark redhat com>]

Hey all ~

Saw the TODO linked from Dan's post and wanted to comment on some of the 
items, it's probably obvious which one I'm going to start with. 

"Warn users of (in)unsecure wireless networks...".

I just wanted to say I think the idea is valiant, however the method is 
not going to achieve the idea.  The people who care about security will 
have already setup a secure network to use and the people who don't care 
about security aren't going to change their behavior because of a dialog 
we put up, it'll just be annoying noise to both crowds.  There's lot of 
evidence out there that these kinds of methods aren't effective, 
application developers have to decide best practices and make those 
defaults or it doesn't really matter.

Near to this, I've seen mail traffic in the past with concerns about NM 
auto switching perhaps while you're away from the computer [1].  I think 
this is a different problem that can be handled differently but wanted 
to address it a little.  If your system is idle when network manager 
auto switches networks perhaps the notification bubble should stick 
around until it's not idle and then behave as it normally does.  That 
might be a behavior that needs to be looked into for other notification 
bubbles though.

"Multiple Active Devices"

I just wanted some clarifications about how this is going to effect our 
average laptop user.  Lets say one of the situations we originally 
designed for, which was having your laptop on wireless and then plugging 
into a wired connection.  I'm assuming that both wireless and wired will 
be active at this point and it seems that you plan (in this situation) 
to add the wired device as the default, higher priority, route.  Is the 
wireless going to continue to be active?  Is the user going to continue 
to receive notifications about changes in the secondary devices?  Just 
thinking that if my wireless connection is bad and I plug into a wired 
connection, am I going to continue seeing my wireless connection bounce 
around even though I'm not (expecting that I'm) using it.  Just looking 
for some clarifications to the behavior.

"Don't connect here again"

I know NM keeps a laundry list of connections I've made like a personal 
wireless little black book.  However we never spent much time on how to 
stop NM from connecting to certain wireless networks.  Is something like 
this in the works?  For me this problem only really occurs in what I 
call the "conference scenario".  Where you're at a conference and 
looking for the wireless, possibly trying a few different connections 
that don't work until you find one that does.  However next time you're 
up and running NM continues to try all the other connections if it 
doesn't see the last one that worked.  Since I haven't been to a 
conference in a while this isn't much of an issue for me anymore, but 
was something I wanted to think about fixing.

I also have questions about the system wide policy stuff, but there's 
probably a better list to interrogate the davidz on how he plans for 
people to the set system wide policy options.

Cheers,
~ Bryan

[1] 
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/networkmanager-list/2006-May/msg00064.html