Re: Moving ppp-manager into ModemManager

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 2009-05-11 at 16:31 -0700, Marcel Holtmann wrote:
> Hi Dan,
> 
> > > I was reading through the pppd code btw. and figure out a way how we
> > > might be able to split this or reimplement in a more proper way. The
> > > pppd code is kinda ancient and carries a lot of code that is not longer
> > > be used in any modern distro. Need to play with this a little bit more
> > > and figure out which PPP features we are actually need and which ones
> > > are just pointless nowadays.
> > 
> > Yeah, PPP code is icky.  But just like dhclient, it doesn't need
> > rewriting.  There are certainly more worthwhile things to spend time on.
> > It's got a responsive upstream who accepts patches, why not fix the
> > specific issues you have and upstream the patches.
> 
> accepts that non of the distros feed their patches back into pppd
> upstream right now. This is a big problem actually.

Is that the distros fault?  Quite possibly.  Upstream was dormant for a
while, but they picked up again about 6 months ago, and even accepted a
boatload of patches.  Time to try again.

> I am just looking into this from a pure academic point of view in what
> is the minimum requirement to get PPP up. For example on a 3G network
> that doesn't do auth or anything. Just pure PPP encapsulation.

Right, but managing modems isn't purely about 3G.  It's also about plain
old 56k, which a lot of people still use.  And don't expect all 3G
modems to work the same way WRT PPP implementation, I've seen enough
variation here already.  The recent bogus DNS server issue is one
symptom of that that upstream has already corrected.

> And I do wanna enable PPP over RFCOMM sockets directly. That is just the
> reason why I started looking into it. Since RFCOMM TTYs are just stupid
> and painful.

So maybe a pppd plugin is in order here.  If PPTP does it, I don't see
why rfcomm cannot.

Dan