Towards including network-manager vpn plugins by default in Ubuntu

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre <mathieu tl gmail com>]

Hi Dan,

There's this bug currently open in Ubuntu:
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+bug/370210

Essentially, it's about the fact that VPN plugins, as they are not
included in the "main" distribution but in "universe" and not
installed by default, it tends to be somewhat unclear to users that
additional packages need to be installed to enable VPN support.

This would be the first logical step, to then work towards making the
plugins installed by default.

I'm suggesting for a way to bring up a dummy package, or some sort of
existence check for plugins, to allow network-manager to notify users
that the support for the VPN plugins is not installed when no VPN
plugins can be found. Is this at all possible?

I think it would make sense to have NetworkManager itself be aware of
the presence of it's plugins, and then be able to tell users that
support is not installed, either through a different layout of the VPN
tab, or a specific behaviour of the Add button.

That kind of piece of code could then either be patched in a
distribution to allow to hook in a package manager to load the
necessary plugins, or to just display a message with the correct
commands required to install the additional packages.

Another option could be to ship some other generic VPN plugin that
only mentions that VPN support is not available or not installed,
which could then be removed by a package manager when the openvpn or
vpnc plugins are installed.

I'm also ready to look into coding the necessary stuff to do that, I
just wanted to run this by the list to see if there were design
suggestions, or a reason why this is not a good idea.

What do you think?

Mathieu Trudel
mathieu tl gmail com