Re: Moving ppp-manager into ModemManager

[Pablo Martí Gamboa <pmarti warp es>]

2009/5/8 Marcel Holtmann <marcel holtmann org>

Hi Pablo,

Hi Marcel,
 

>         what do you guys think about moving the ppp-manager part from
>         NetworkManager into ModemManager?
>
>         What is the actual reason why ModemManager doesn't handle the
>         PPP part
>         of a data connection?
>
> Because NetworkManager also happens to support pppoe and friends

and with the same argument the support for DSL modems etc. could also be
moved into ModemManager.

My problem is that if ModemManager as a standalone can not deal with the
PPP portion of a dialup connection, then it is nothing more than an AT
command parser with D-Bus interface. I am failing to see the point why
this code was ever moved outside NetworkManager to begin with then.

Well, ModemManager can be think of as a NetworkManager plugin, without ModemManager NetworkManager is still functional for all the ethernet/wifi/vpn operations. I guess that the goal is to keep a lean NetworkManager core; all this modems require special at commands (most of them proprietary) to configure and talk to them. NetworkManager is not interested in all those details, it just wants to configure a device with some given settings and connect to Internet.

By having it as a separate piece of code, other applications can depend on ModemManager and talk to 3g devices without having to install NetworkManager and its dependencies. Also, there are some alternative ModemManager implementations, like Wader, and bundling ModemManager with NetworkManager would defeat one of ModemManager's original purposes: Having a spec'ed API allows for different implementations that can be seamlessly swapped.

Best regards,
Pablo

-- 
Pablo Martí
http://www.linkedin.com/in/pmarti || http://www.warp.es
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