Re: NM CLI

[John Mahoney <jmahoney waav com>]

At the risk of contradicting my personal feelings towards a NM CLI,  I would have to say the idea of porting network manager to the command line is some what of a paradox.

NEG.
1. NM's main goal has been to make network configuration transparent and simple to the common user.
2. NM will always be a few months behind the fundamental kernel drivers and user space applications which drive networking and often require understanding of scripting in BASH or comparable.
3. The NM CLI based off the GUI would be even further behind the NM applet, unless properly engineer.
4. Most Linux users have come to appreciate the simplicity of NM and only turn back to command line when NM is not yet able to implement a complex networking feature.

POS.
1. User running headless box could also benefit from NM. 
2. Easily script NM configuration changes.
3. If you are like myself using a GUI is like pulling teeth, yet I have delightfully found NM to be the "laughing gas" of GUI's which has brought some people to actually enjoy dentist visits.(obscure analogy)

If someone was to implement a *real* CLI, I believe it would have to use the same guts as the GUI or else it would be a QA nightmare. Anyone who read this far thank you for your time and I would like to conclude by saying I would be for a NM CLI if other felt it truly is possible.

--
John

On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 7:03 PM, Bryan Duff <duff0097 gmail com> wrote:

I have.  It's written in python, and needs a lot of work (fex, last time I checked it had no support for mobile broadband wireless).

I'd prefer C over python, and I figured that wouldn't be too difficult given what nm-applet already offers.  Pidgin might be a good example - they seem to have nm-applet functionality built in.  So going the C lib route would allow for a cli program (library frontend) as well a building this functionality into other programs.  In this sense python feels restrictive.

-Bryan

On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 3:29 PM, Rodney Morris <rodamorris gmail com> wrote:

On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 2:26 PM, Bryan Duff<duff0097 gmail com> wrote:
> Is there anyone going forward with this?
>
> It would be useful for non-X or non-KDE/GNOME setups.  And if people do
> think it's worth doing (I do) then what is the best path?
>
> 1) Split nm-applet into nm-client-lib (backend - with dbus calls) and gnome
> based nm-applet, then create an nm-cli.
>  - I like this option the most because this should re-use a lot of code
> (libnm_* for example).
>
> 2) Or something I haven't thought of.
>
> I've seen a couple partial implementations of a NM cli, but they all use
> python (often poorly), and I think that's unnecessary.  Hopefully I'm late
> to the party and something is already being done about this.
>

(Forgot to repy to the list.)

Have you looked into cnetworkmanager?  According to its discription on
the Fedora build system:

"Cnetworkmanager is a command-line client for NetworkManager, intended
to supplement or replace the GUI applets."

You can get more information and download the source at
http://vidner.net/martin/software/cnetworkmanager/.

I have no idea how well it works as I've never used it.  I just
noticed the program a couple of weeks ago when a bunch of updates were
pushed out for F10 and F11.

Rod

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