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

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Sun, 2010-01-24 at 14:31 -0400, Tambet Ingo wrote:
> 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.

I was generally moving towards just an applet-like CLI client, and since
people that want to use a CLI for that sort of stuff will obviously be
familiar with CLI-based configuration, they will certainly be expected
to know how to configure either keyfiles or their distro config files.
I don't think we really need a CLI nm-connection-editor at all.

Dan