Fedora (Linux) is Destroying it self

Ralf Corsepius rc040203 at freenet.de
Thu May 14 06:00:29 UTC 2009


Christopher Aillon wrote:
> On 05/13/2009 02:29 PM, nodata wrote:
>> Am Mittwoch, den 13.05.2009, 13:57 -0700 schrieb Toshio Kuratomi:
>>> nirik (Kevin Fenzi) has just packaged up the cnetwork-manager program.
>>> "c" stands for command line in this case.
>>>
>>> -Toshio
>>
>> Thanks a lot. I didn't know about this, I thought we were meant to use
>> nm-tool.
>>
>> But I think this demonstrates a point I made, because the command line
>> tool came last :(
> 
> Though, if someone had come by and made a new CLI tool for managing 
> networks a few years ago, would people really decide to switch their CLI 
> tool because of it?   Would it have gotten the development and user
> community behind it to support its development?
Well, probably not, because ...

a) Those people who wanted something like "NM", are not the same people 
who want CLI-tools.

b) For those people wanting CLI-tools, NM is just a series of 
regressions and problems, something which doesn't deserve to be taken 
seriously. They _turned away_ from using and supporting NM, may-be even 
from using Fedora, in particular since NM tries to replace networking 
scripts.

c) "network scripts" had not been that bad as some people might want 
them to appear. They suffered from bugs and poor maintenance, but that's 
it. As long as NM had been optional, the CLI-folks didn't see a need to 
get involved.


In short:
IMO, NM and network-scripts are/were addressing different user audiences 
and use-cases. Neither one actually meets both audiences' demands.

  Before NM, the "dial-on demand/single-user/desktop" users were 
dissatisfied, now the "static connection/multi-users/server" users are 
dissatisfied.

Unfortunately, the latter are likely a much smaller group than the 
former (Accused to be "corner-cases"), which has allowed NM to win, and 
now is the cause to ruck-sack it to meet the CLI-user's demands.

> My guess is probably 
> not, especially given there were several CLI tools that attempted to do 
> the automation back when NM first came out.  People are picky about 
> their command line tools.  What happened happened, and probably couldn't 
> have happened any other way.

It could have ... it would have been a matter of will.

Instead, RH actively supported the NetworkManager devs, despite the 
criticism NM had received and still receives (Other distros went 
different ways).

IMO, we are now actually discussing to work around to the flaws NM 
suffers from and to tweak it into something "usable".

Ralf






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