Re: Suitability for embedded linux device

["Tambet Ingo" <tambet gmail com>]

On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 12:01 PM, Nitin Mahajan <nitinm76 yahoo com> wrote:
> I was going through  the features of  Network Manager. The D-BUS API feature is very interesting.
>
> Whether the Network Manager is suitable to be used in Embedded Linux device, without GNOME?

It should be, yes. The only additional dependecies on top of what DBus
and HAL already have are libnl, dbus-glib, policy-kit, a crypto
library (mozilla-nss or gnutls) and wpa_supplicant. So additional
dependencies to any other implementation should be only dbus-glib and
policy-kit, neither of those should be unsuitable for embedded
devices. NM shouldn't use a lot of resources (memory or CPU) either.

> I also wanted to know, Whether the Network Manager has any distribution specific dependencies? If yes how tightly they are coupled with the distribution?

All (currently, almost all, but that's going to change) the
distribtion specific code is moved out of NetworkManager and into the
system settings daemon. That daemon is modular used to provide
configurations (connection informations) to NM. Currently there are 3
backends for it: Fedora and SUSE (to parse /etc/sysconfig/network/*)
files and also a generic GKeyFile (.ini -like) native backend which
works on any distribution. So, for example, there's no debian backend
for it, but that does not mean it does not work on debian (in truth,
it sort of doesn't, but that's because of dbus configuration
differences, not directly caused by NM code).

Tambet