Announcing ConnMan.net [LWN.net]

Announcing ConnMan.net

Posted Jun 24, 2009 16:47 UTC (Wed) by wstephenson (guest, #14795)
In reply to: Announcing ConnMan.net by dcbw
Parent article: Announcing ConnMan.net

The simplifying approach I've taken for KDE, to make it possible for non-NM specialists to work on the GUI, is to produce a high level flat list of "things that the user might want to click"

1) Wireless networks (as the NM dbus api only gives a list of access points)
2) Connection on an Interface.

This list is pre-filtered on appropriateness (a fuzzy definition but you know what I mean - don't list any connections where a matching AP is not visible - don't list wired connections when there is no cable inserted, don't show anything wireless when in flight mode, etc).

From what I've read of the ConnMan docs so far, they have taken a similar approach in what is presented to the client, giving up some correctness and flexibility in the model (at that layer) for ease of use.

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Announcing ConnMan.net

Posted Jun 24, 2009 18:27 UTC (Wed) by dcbw (guest, #50562) [Link]

You'll probably remember that NM 0.6 did group "networks" together for you. That turned out to be a huge mistake in the daemon, because you need to separate networks based on SSID, capabilities, and band. Unfortunately, trying to over-simplify things is exactly what caused problems with NetworkManager 0.6, since you simply cannot trust people to actually name their access points reliably. Thus you end up with situations where you have two APs called 'linksys' with different security settings, and the user wants to connect to the higher-security one, but not the lower-security one. Or, their linksys AP is on the A-band, but their neighbors is on the B/G band.

Similarly, we found that *not* showing interfaces that were disabled or not managed by NM caused *huge* numbers of bug reports, mostly from Ubuntu users asking "where's my wifi card" when Ubuntu set their wifi card unmanaged by default and it disappeared from the applet.

So the gnome applet tries to give you an informed view of your machine, including why you can't do some things you may want to, instead of just hiding those items completely. The same reason why menu items get disabled rather than hidden outright.