NetworkManager system-wide use

[Dan Williams]

On Fri, 2006-05-26 at 11:14 -0600, Philip Prindeville wrote:
> Dan Williams wrote:
> > On Fri, 2006-05-26 at 06:19 +0000, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> >   
> >> FYI, I found this while browsing the accepted SoC applications:
> >> http://code.google.com/soc/gentoo/appinfo.html?csaid=1875FC7DA1FE03E4
> >>
> >>     
> >>> If this is completed, work should be done on WiFi key handling: currently,
> >>> NetworkManager will ask the user for the WEP or WPA key of the wireless
> >>> network it connects to every time it connects, which isn't very
> >>> user-friendly. As Gentoo allows one to configure wireless network settings
> >>> in /etc/conf.d/wireless, the keys could be retrieved from that file. Some
> >>> changes to NetworkManager's core will be necessary to support this though,
> >>> which implies one can't be sure it'll be accepted by the core maintainers.
> >>>       
> >> Looks like you can take this off your TODO. :-)
> >>     
> >
> > Sort of...  We've already got plans in this area, but of course if
> > somebody else wants to fix it, that's great :)
> >
> > http://live.gnome.org/NetworkManagerToDo?action=show
> >
> > See the top item there.  We're not necessarily going to be pulling keys
> > from config files here; instead it will be a slightly larger scoped
> > solution.  The idea here is to do it right, not just hack in a shim over
> > the existing (somewhat-broken shellscript hacktower hell) config stuff
> > that many distros already have.
> >
> > Dan
> >   
> 
> Sorry for the slight digression, but can someone explain to me why
> NetworkManager has a dependency on wpa_supplicant?  Not all
> wireless networks use WEP/WPA (some are wide open).  Further,
> not all networked machines (like my desktop) have Wireless NIC's.

NM funnels _all_ wifi stuff except for scanning and strength through
wpa_supplicant.  There's no reason to keep two codepaths in NM for
connection setup/teardown, one for non-WEP and one for WEP/WPA.

Plus the whole hotplug thing.  However, there are some fundamental
assumptions that NM makes right now about the existence of
wpa_supplicant that won't hold true once I do the dbus control interface
bits for NM.  So if you really, really don't want to use it, you
wouldn't have to.  But in the interest of having everything "just work",
we'll probably keep the RPM Requires: for the forseeable future.

Dan