starting Fedora Server SIG

[Dan Williams]

On Fri, 2008-11-14 at 15:41 -0500, Martin Langhoff wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 3:17 PM, Martin Langhoff
> <martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 1:22 PM, Jeremy Katz <katzj at redhat.com> wrote:
> >> On Fri, 2008-11-14 at 13:13 -0500, Martin Langhoff wrote:
> >>> I agree with the desire to maintain only one tool. However, NM is
> >>> extremely desktop oriented, and there seems to include no hint of an
> >>> intention to support the complex setups that are possible with the old
> >>> ifcfg infra.
> >>
> >> Really?  Most of the work over the past couple of years in NM seems to
> >> be aimed at trying to support these cases as opposed to just the
> >> "simple" desktop case
> >
> > That's odd -- I've never seen any of it. Are there good examples of
> > how you configure a server to do special stuff with it? Or a
> > 'scripting network-manager' guide somewhere?
> 
> A bit of reading of the NM website and published docs makes me think
> that Jeremy is probably overoptimistic about the applicability of NM
> to server roles, and any intentions of scriptability.
> 
> The design goals don't include scriptability or anything that would
> resonate with sysadmins:
> http://projects.gnome.org/NetworkManager/developers/design_goals.html
> 
> The page for administrators doesn't provide anything useful
> http://projects.gnome.org/NetworkManager/admins/
> 
> And looking for an API leads me to this page (which is probably
> outdated) - a very limited API that won't do any of the things I need
> in the School Server.
> http://people.redhat.com/dcbw/NetworkManager/NetworkManager%20DBUS%20API.txt
> 
> In summary I don't think NM is designed for this. OTOH, it does the
> desktop thing well...

It goes back to documentation.  While the project as a whole is pretty
good at code, we're horrible at documentation.  We do have D-Bus
interface documentation however.  The project site desperately needs to
updated for NM 0.7.

Dan