wpa_supplicant support for ifup

[Dan Williams]

On Wed, 2006-03-15 at 12:25 +0100, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> On Wednesday, 15 March 2006 at 03:50, Dan Williams wrote:
> > On Wed, 2006-03-15 at 02:02 +0100, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> > > On Wednesday, 15 March 2006 at 00:02, Michael H. Warfield wrote:
> > > > On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 12:26 -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > > > > Harald Hoyer (harald at redhat.com) said: 
> > > > > > What do you think about the attached patch to ifup-wireless? Works for me :)
> > > > 
> > > > > This should really be done in NM.
> > > > 
> > > > 	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.
> > > 
> > > +1
> > > 
> > > Personally, I find NM quite troublesome and the named dependency puts me
> > > off immensely. Why the hell do I need to install a domain name server(!)
> > > on a laptop? I'm sticking with ifup/ifdown for the time being.
> > 
> > For a few reasons:
> 
> [snip reasons I don't really care about]
> 
> > 3) If you don't like named, DON'T USE IT.  What you don't seem to
> > realize is that NM doesn't require named.  It doesn't launch named.  It
> > doesn't use named unless named is running, and named's dbus service is
> > enabled.  NM will happily write /etc/resolv.conf, just like you want, if
> > you don't run named.  The choice is, actually, up to you.
> 
> Please check the facts before replying with such confidence. I suggest you
> look at the spec again (version 0.6.0-3):

I help work on NetworkManager, and I'm responsible for packaging it in
Fedora.  So I sure do know what's going on with it, thanks.

The point here is that upstream NetworkManager does _not_ require named.
SUSE doesn't ship with it on, neither does Ubuntu.  In Fedora we made
the decision to use named to get a better experience for laptop and
mobile users.  That includes requiring caching-nameserver in the
specfile.

What you're complaining about is that the current Fedora package doesn't
fit your exact use case.  That's fine.  When writing software you don't
try to please everyone right away, because then you fail.  And because
it doesn't meet your exact use case right now, it requires package that
you don't wish to install.  Right now the tradeoff is that it works for
a lot of other people, but it doesn't work for you.  That's acceptable
to me.

BUT, we want it to work for you in the near future.  As NetworkManager
is gradually expanded, in a maintainable and _responsible_ way, it's
going to cover more and more use-cases, including ones like yours.  This
will hopefully happen in the FC6 timeframe.

Dan