Re: ppp support naming

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2008-03-05 at 14:46 +0100, Will Stephenson wrote:
> On Wednesday 05 March 2008, Bastien Nocera said:
> > On Wed, 2008-03-05 at 11:58 +0100, Will Stephenson wrote:
> > <snip>
> >
> > > Does that mean that we need extra development to support HDSPA/UTMS
> > > networks? Does "CDMA" in NetworkManager only literally support CDMA
> > > networks?
> >
> > No, they're already supported. The CDMA and GSM bits in NetworkManager
> > refer to the command sets used by the different technologies, not to the
> > over-the-air technologies.
> 
> Then I misunderstood.

Well, they do sort of refer to the over-the-air technologies.  Ideally
we'd be able to figure out the provider of service, or the name of the
card if it wasn't locked to a provider, and show that string in the UI.
We do show CDMA/GSM in the gnome applet UI right now, but that's
something we can change.

> > > If that's the case, obviously the API naming is fine as is.  Otherwise we
> > > should make it more generic.
> >
> > More generic for what? They have different command sets, so they use
> > different implementations in NM.
> 
> I mean that when a class of cellular technologies are served by one 
> NetworkManager component, the name of that component should be a generic 
> name, not the name of one of a member of that class.

We're probably gonna have a WiMAX device class at some point too.  Since
most WiMAX devices are real network devices and don't hide behind PPP,
it's a completely different story there.

The NM _implementation_ will expose WiMAX, but the applets don't have to
show that in the UI if they don't want to.  An applet could show all
mobile broadband connections as "Mobile Broadband Connection" and if
there is more than one mobile broadband device available, identify each
one by it's device name.  I'm probably going to make the NM applet do
that at some point soon rather than splitting them out by technology,
because the user shouldn't care what type it really is.

I consider "GSM" to be the generic name for every technology in the
following list, because all these technologies are GSM-derived, or all
have GSM as a direct ancestor.  Furthermore, all devices implementing
these technologies use the same AT command sets (GSM-07.07 and
GSM-07.05):

GSM
HSCSD
GPRS
EDGE
UMTS (WCDMA)
HSDPA
HSUPA
HSPA+

I consider "CDMA" to be the generic name for every technology in the
following list, because all these technologies have IS-95 as a direct
ancestor.  Furthermore, all devices implementing these technologies use
the same AT command sets (IS-707-A):

IS-95 (cdmaOne)
CDMA2000 1x
EVDO rev 0
EVDO rev A

It remains to be seen where LTE will fall; but it's likely to be a
GSM-class technology because GSM was it's ancestor.  But we don't have
to care for at least 2 years :)

Dan