Interview with NetworkManager developer Dan Williams [LWN.net]

Interview with NetworkManager developer Dan Williams

Posted Feb 26, 2008 14:36 UTC (Tue) by dcbw (subscriber, #50562)
In reply to: Interview with NetworkManager developer Dan Williams by crackmonkey
Parent article: Interview with NetworkManager developer Dan Williams

I'd expect your issues aren't with GConf as a storage system per se.  It's a fine place to
store configuration and quite a few apps do it.  NetworkManager can also pull configuration
information from text files in /etc.

The absence of GConf schema is something we can quite easily rectify in 0.7 since the
configuration format is well-defined there.  I'm curious though; in what ways would having a
GConf schema make things work more smoothly for you?

If you delete an network from GConf, NetworkManager will _never_ autoconnect to that network
again, until you tell it to explicitly from the NM menu.  Any behavior other than that is a
bug.  If you've picked the network from the menu before, that network is fair game for NM.

Both 0.6.x and 0.7 include connection editors that allow you to easily delete saved networks
too.

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Editing gconf

Posted Feb 26, 2008 17:06 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link]

I think he wants a schema so that he can use XML tools to edit the GConf database. He should probably be talking to gconfd instead, however we all like using text files the way they were intended to be modified on Unix, with an editor. Perhaps gconf should detect this using fstat, etc. In general modifying a gconf entry with an editor means you kill gconfd and the application that you are configuring, edit, and restart gconfd and the application. I went through this recently when some spurious gconf data caused my laptop keyboard to be repeatedly locked in NUM-shift, which made it impossible to even use the shell from X, I had to use a console terminal interface to recover from this.

Bruce