Re: Are there any command-line front-ends for network-manager?

[Tambet Ingo <tambet gmail com>]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 02:53, Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com> wrote:
> In general uou'll want to *configure* connections using your distro's normal
> network configuration system (which NetworkManager should pick up
> automatically)

In general, I think it's a bad suggestion. The distro networking tools
are (usually?) for configuring one static configuration per device
which does not really match well with NetworkManager. For example,
using distro tools, I create a connection for SSID "mywlan". It
becomes one of many connection "profiles" in NetworkManager and you'd
be very surprised to see NM connected to another network instead.
Another example, you configure a device and use "don't connect
automatically, let user activate it manually". Again, it becomes one
of available configurations for the device, and NM will happily
activate the device automatically with another connection data,
seemingly ignoring that it was told to not connect automatically.

In short, as long as there's more than one connection profile
available, it's not guaranteed that the distro configuration is used.
Because of that, (and countless bugs from confused users) I've
disabled support of using distro network configuration for
NetworkManager for openSUSE packages (and received only a few
complaints, so people seem to be happier now).

If we really care about CLI only NetworkManager, we'll need to write a
nm-connection-editor type of CLI thing too. Or if we want to support
distro tools, make it harder (impossible?) to use more than one
connection profile per device.

Tambet