Re: NetworkManager for Ubuntu Touch

[Lubomir Rintel <lkundrak v3 sk>]

Hello Florian,

thanks for your message.

On Tue, 2018-11-20 at 11:23 +0100, Florian Leeber via networkmanager-list wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> my name is Florian Leeber and I am in the BoD of the upcoming UBports 
> Foundation, which promotes Ubuntu Touch since Canonical has abandoned 
> it. We have so far achieved a continuation of the project, delivering an 
> upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04 and so forth.
>
> When it comes to networking, some things are crucial for a smooth user 
> experience on a mobile device. Unlike to a desktop or fixed server 
> device, a mobile device has to tackle a lot of challenges with changing 
> networks, WiFi connections, loosing contact, constantly changing IP 
> addresses etc.

We're dealing with exact same challenges on machines larger than phones
too.

> NetworkManager has been patched for that by Canonical and others, but we 
> still think it could improve a lot.

For quite some time I think the Canonical folks have done a good job at
upstreaming their changes. E.g. ofono support got in, which I figure
was one of the larger patches.

Perhaps there wouldn't be too much stuff left if NM gets rebased to
something more recent (more on that below).

> But we are a small team, and we are 
> constantly looking for help. So in this context, I am currently looking 
> for an experienced dev that knows NetworkManager fairly well, in order 
> to help us test and improve it for the mobile experience we want to 
> achieve. If necessary he/she can receive a test device with Ubuntu Touch 
> and the necessary support. However, we cannot pay for the support at 
> them moment.

There's basically four regular contributors to NetworkManager at the
moment, all of us happy to improve its usefulness on phones, provided
we understand what the deficiencies are.

A device could help, but I think even more useful would be an x86
compose of your distribution that could be run in a VM. Do you have
such builds? I suppose that would help us understand what are the
specifics of the phone setup (I guess you run a different desktop
shell, have Android kernel beneath, ofono instead of ModemManager,
etc.).

> The first goal will be to update/backport things if necessary for the 
> currently used 16.04 LTS version (1.2.2 I think). I know this is quite 
> old, but we are bound to what we get from usual Ubuntu sources for the 
> time being. Backporting can be done by our developers as well, if they 
> are guided which things to be aware of.

We don't break things, including API/ABI and do regularly test our
builds on Ubuntu 16.04. The version number in itself doesn't carry much
meaning -- an update to 1.14.x at this point should be staightforward
and safe.

> Another very urgent task is to get connectivity / captive portal 
> recognition working, so that users can more easily connect to public 
> networks. This involves signalling from NM to the OS in some way so that 
> a popup notification with a link to the web browser is being shown.

NetworkManager is doing captive portal detection for ages, though it
recently got somewhat better. The notification should be done in the
desktop shell.

For the reference -- GNOME Shell deals with it and should provide a
good example. I guess KDE does too. nm-applet does not.

> I am looking forward to hearing from anyone who is interested, her eon 
> the ML or on my email addy.

Don't hesitate to ask more, especially when we do something that
doesn't make sense on a phone or miss something that would be useful.
The more technical context you provide the better.

I'm quite certain it's not only me who appreciates that you decided to
keep the upstream project in the loop.

Take care,
Lubo

> BR Florian
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