Re: Towards including network-manager vpn plugins by default in Ubuntu

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 2009-06-22 at 13:24 -0400, Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre wrote:
> 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?

Yes, it's possible, but there's the issue that if they aren't installed,
maybe the user didn't want them at all in the first place?  I think what
you want actually is in the connection editor, in the VPN tab, some
notification that no VPN plugins are installed, and here's how you get
them.  Then, nm-connection-editor asks PackageKit (or whatever) to try
to find the plugins and install them.

> 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.

Right, nm-connection-editor could surely be more helpful here.  Or,
Ubuntu could install them by default.  Either way.

> 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.

Could be, though PackageKit is a logical choice.  Not sure if Ubuntu
uses that yet (last I checked no), but in the end, maybe it would be
configurable at build-time so that the distro could pre-build the right
stuff for their software.

> 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.

That would be excellent.  Perhaps when there aren't any plugins, the
list box could be grayed (or just gtk_widget_hide() and pack another
widget in the same box) and we put a message there saying that no VPN
software is installed, and a button for "Look for VPN software..." which
launches the appropriate package manager to find some.  Sound OK?

It's something we've wanted for a while actually.

Dan