wpa_supplicant support for ifup

[Jon Nettleton]

On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 21:52 -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Michael H. Warfield (mhw at wittsend.com) said: 
> > 	Some of us would prefer to avoid being plagued by NM.  It
> > (wpa_supplicant) works just fine, independent of NM and I've just got it
> > hooked in the bottom of the ifup scripts as they describe doing on the
> > project site.  So far, I haven't found a problem that NM solves for me
> > and a few that it creates for me.  NM and wpa_supplicant should each be
> > optional and orthogonal to each other.
> 
> That's implying that there should always be two completely disparate
> and conflicting sources of network configuration (NM and ifcfg-X); I
> really don't think that's practical long-term.
> 
> Bill
> 
Why are these understood as conlicting and disparate?  The way I see it,
is in the system-config-network gui you ask "activate on boot", and
"allow user to control". Why not ask "controlled by NetworkManager" that
just turns off the other two options, and in the Redhat specific
NetworkManager code write functions that look for that setting to know
whether or not to configure that interface?

I like NetworkManager and use it, but only on the laptop that I connect
to a lot of networks on ( and until NetworkManager can map different
firewall settings to a connection it is still cumbersome).  I haven't
read a convincing reason to not use ifcfg scripts for basic, repetitive,
static network configuration.

Sorry about being so opinionated about this subject.  I just feel the
direction this distro is going in concerns to this subject is losing
touch with how people use it.  It is great to be excited about allowing
a laptop to connect to lots of networks easily, but that is completely
useless for a desktop, or a server.

Jon