System Config Tools Cleanup Project - tools to eliminate/replace

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Wed Mar 25 12:33:15 UTC 2009


On Wed, 2009-03-25 at 12:17 +0000, Bill Crawford wrote:
> On Wednesday 25 March 2009 06:56:08 Arthur Pemberton wrote:
> 
> > What's the point of asking for that when you can already turn
> > NetworkManager off. If NetworkManager fills all the role provided by
> > s-c-network, there's no point in having two ways to do the same thing.
> > I started off by saying that there are several things that
> > NetworkManager doesn't do yet so s-c-network shouldn't be removed yet.
> 
> The worry is that the "NM can replace this" argument is heading towards removal 
> of the "old" way of doing things, and for a few people that's annoying. It is 
> not a true replacement; it does very different things.
> 
> > Some of these things bring change and seem to make some people overly
> > nervous, as long you can do things the old way, try not to block
> > change that is useful to everyone else.  It's just like PulseAudio, it
> > helps a lot of people, but it works terribly for me, so I just removed
> > it. No need to go complaining about its existence.
> 
> We're not "complaining about its existence" we are objecting to it being forced 
> as a "replacement" in all situations, even though it a) doesn't really support 
> all those situations, and b) is unnecessary in at least some of them.
> 
> No one is "blocking change that is useful to everyone else", some people object 
> to having this change forced on them ...
> 
> The "it still works" argument is disingenuous when the NM solution is being 
> touted as a complete replacement for the "old" way, ... we're not stupid, we 
> know the plan is to remove the "old" way of doing things completely. Some of us 
> think this should be postponed until NM can *actually* be a replacement, and I 
> for one would like it if NM would "get out of the way" ... I have a single 
> wired ethernet connection on this machine, and no matter how much RAM I have, 
> using some of it semi-permanently to support NM in the background is a waste.
> 
> Not saying you shouldn't have your NM, just want to be sure I won't be forced to 
> use it :o)

I think there's some heat being generated here due to the fact that
'NetworkManager' is not a suitably specific term :)

>From the discussion it appears that the 'Edit Connections' tool in
NetworkManager (nm-connection-editor) can perform some configuration
tasks even if you are not actually using the NetworkManager daemon -
i.e. it can configure the 'old school' /etc/sysconfig files. This is the
sense in which NetworkManager can 'replace' s-c-n, I believe.

So what's really important is: what can s-c-n configure in
the /etc/sysconfig system than nm-connection-editor cannot? All the
(useful) functions in s-c-n have to be available in nm-connection-editor
before s-c-n can safely be dropped. That's the real issue, I think.

I don't think anyone is proposing dropping the support for the 'network'
service and /etc/sysconfig configuration files, so it's not really
useful to discuss whether that's a good idea or not, since it isn't
happening.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net




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