Re: ANN: Release of NetworkManager 0.8.996 (0.9.0-beta2)

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 2011-05-09 at 19:51 +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
> On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 7:13 PM, Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com> wrote:
> > On Sun, 2011-05-08 at 22:07 +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
> >> Hi Dan,
> >>
> >> >> Sorry for the delayed response
> >> >>
> >> >> Sugar is the other one that comes to mind. It seems to partially work
> >> >> if you have a system connection like either a wired ethernet or
> >> >> connect to a connection using gnome3 and then login to the sugar
> >> >> interface it partially works. I think the issues are two bits. Firstly
> >> >> the ability to detect a connection and that its online, secondly
> >> >> moving the user settings code over to systems code. Any assistance or
> >> >> patches would be welcome (I'm only new to python), sample code in
> >> >> python would be useful too (I've only managed to find the anaconda
> >> >> patch and it's not much use for the use case).
> >> >
> >> > Yeah, Sugar would need a patch.  The first part (porting to NM 0.9 for
> >> > status information) is pretty easy, the second part where Sugar acts as
> >> > an applet is harder, but actually might be fairly simple with NM 0.9.
> >> > It's been in the back of my mind for a while, but I haven't gotten
> >> > around to doing a proof-of-concept even though I wrote a lot of the
> >> > original code for it 5 years ago :)
> >>
> >> I've done the first hack up of a patch (attached) for NM 0.9. Not sure
> >> if it works as I've not got a wifi based F-15 with me at the moment.
> >> I'll test it more when I get home from RH summit in the next couple of
> >> days. In the mean time is it possible for you to provide some feedback
> >> and advise.
> >>
> >> I'm mostly trying to focus on connection status and wired/wireless
> >> ethernet initially although I've changed some of the GSM based stuff.
> >> I'm not sure if I've got the GSM/Serial -> Modem changes correct.
> >>
> >> Also I'm not sure if I've got the NM_ACTIVE_CONNECTION_STATE* bits
> >> correct as the .h file upstream only has a 0 error code where the
> >> Sugar stuff had numbers for each state.
> >>
> >>  I've looked at a number of patches but I'm not sure if I've got it
> >> all right and I might have confused bits of the compat API too. :-/
> >
> > Sorry I hadn't gotten around to looking at the Sugar bits yet, but I'll
> > happily review what you've got so far.
> 
> I've done minor testing in a VM and it had issues with the move from
> UserSettings to the new system settings. Would love some help with
> that and it would be awesome if we could get something that would work
> for basic wifi into f15.

nm-applet accomplishes that move by checking GConf if it's applet
"stamp" is a certain value (indicating that import has already been
performed) and if not, grabs each connection from GConf and calls NM's
AddConnection() dbus method for each setting.  This happens the first
time the new applet runs and is transparent for the user; after that the
connections are system-owned connections.  The applet also does some
fixup on the "secret flags" for the secrets in each connection, because
those are in the applet's keyring and we keep them in the user's
session.  This basically means iterating through each secret in the
connection and setting the "agent-owned" flag in the setting dict for
each secret, before calling AddConnection(). Then NM will call the
registered secret agent and request secrets for that connection, which
Sugar would pass back just like the old "GetSecrets" call used to work,
really.

Dan