By looking at bugs filed and words spent in several different bug trackers and mailing lists, I fear NM developers may be quite allergic to the words forming the subject of this email, but though indeed the problem gathered a big attention, I didn't find any (reasonably recent) documented answer to the three questions I'm asking, so here ends the prologue: 1) the most clear answer I found to the claim: "NM doesn't support generic ppp, so I must connect with $APP_TO_HANDLE_PPP_CONNECTION and NM doesn't notice it, so $APP_USING_NETWORK doesn't connect, thinking I'm disconnected" is at [0] and basically says: "nobody is working on it, if somebody would like to, please step in". This was obviously an admissible position; is it still true, or did the creation of MobileManager change future hopes of generic (or at least bluetooth) ppp support in NM? I ask it because the name of the project seems to suggest it, though in presenting it at [1], Dan only talks about "All mobile broadbands", and the same does the README. 2) supposing that answer to 1) is "no, people connecting via a traditional modem or a mobile via bluetooth shouldn't just hope NM supporting them soon", then wouldn't it make sense to allow _setting_, instead than just _querying_, online/offline status via DBUS? This would allow, with few lines of code, tools like Gnome-PPP to say "hey, NM, we _are_ online"[2] Then, in the network connections menu, an item "externally managed connection" could also possibly show up and activate... I perfectly understand this is not something NM developers dream of, being not part of the standard infrastructure, but it would be of huge help to those who - like me and many people I know of (BTW, from personal experience I frankly doubt about the 98% Alexander's estimate in [0]) - need to connect via bluetooth/standard modems (it may be OT, but let me mention that this is one of the few things Windows/OS X softwares do nicely since many years and Linux Desktop doesn't). I (don't know NM internals and) suppose some things may not work as usually: for instance, I can imagine sharing a connection would be a problem, if NM doesn't control it... but _this_ is really a minor problem. 3) Why was PPP generic support dropped? Because it was broken/lacking manpower or just because mobile broadband support covered many of the use cases of it? thanks for your patience in answering(/providing me pointers if the questions are indeed answered elsewhere). Pietro Battiston [0] http://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+bug/220497/ [1] http://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/2009/03/20/thats-when-i-reach-for-my-revolver/ [2] They could also say "hey, NM, we are online thanks to the process with pid $pid, assume we are online as long as it is alive!", or "we are online thanks to card ppp*, assume we are online until it exists!"... but this is not _so_ necessary, since it would be easy, for the calling app, to spawn a separate monitoring process which finally would say "hey, NM, control back to you" at the end of the connection.
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