Fedora Core 4 Test Update: NetworkManager-0.5.1-1.FC4.1

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 1/11/06, Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net> wrote:
> You are assuming that there are no wireless or laptop workstations.
> Some people use wireless because it is easier than running a wire, not
> because the system is mobile.

I think the point is... wireless situations with something
approximating a consistently available network can use the older
s-c-network mechanism for their usage case. A non-mobile but wireless
workstation or desktop that was expected to do network activity with
noone logged in would fall into this wouldn't it?  For those users the
pre-NM situation still exists?

I think system wide configuration for no-one logged in for all of the
snazzy dbus service related software thats being developed now is
important. But if there is a pre dbus-enabled fallback mechanism
available for systemwide policy in the short-term, I think thats a
livable compromise.

NM like the other dbus related service managers are works in progress,
I really don't think the long term development goals benefit from
waiting for these things to be perfect. Let me be very clear. I think
NM would be 3 billion percent more useful, to me personally, if it had
system wide configs instead of just per-user configs. But I'm willing
to wait for that functionality to mature as long as the more
traditional networking configuration options are still available for
me to use to setup system wide policy.

I think  David Zeuthen makes a persuasive outline of the way forward
concerning system/per-user for whatever dbus-enabled manager you could
dream up in  http://blog.fubar.dk/?p=63 .

If NM is suboptimal for systemwide use in FC5 really doesn't interest
me at all. Even partially functional NM that really only addresses
mobile laptop users is progress... as long as there is a traditional
network configuration mechanism to fallback on.  What interests me is
that there is a plan to address system-wide configs for DBUS managers
of all flavors that can and will be implemented as part of an
achievable development roadmap.



-jef