Herriot, Nicholas, VF-Group wrote: > Having read this post I feel I have to add my bit in to the mix!
Allow me to add my bit too :) I write dhcpcd [1], a DHCP client. NM-0.7 supports dhcpcd-4, upwards. dhcpcd-5 does a lot that NM does as well, but this is not a nyah nyah mines better than yours post. However, what it does is relevant to this discussion. > There seems to be two methodologies around this: > > 1) You may have more than one connection manager (e.g. A Network Manager > and a Modem Manger). Applications that run and require network > connectivity would maybe ask Network Manager via D-Bus have you got a > connection. If the answer is no, they move on to the Modem Manager and > do the same thing. I'd like to hear peoples opinions on this? > > 2) Network manager has a way to pass connectivity information to it. > (e.g. An API for an app to send info about a connection to Network > Manager. Hence a Modem Manager could say "I've made a connection, here > are the details about this connection."). Network manager would then be > the global manager of the connection and still be the single point of > contact for apps to talk to when discovering connections on the system. > As before I'd like to here peoples opinions on this. I would suggest a third way :) dhcpcd-5 only configures the protocol - address, routing and any on disk configuration required. It does not know anything about the link beyond a few flags. This is by design. As dhcpcd doesn't know about PPP it instead listens to the kernel for RTM_NEWADDR messages and reacts accordingly. So NM doesn't have to know about every type of link or modem manager in existence - just listen to kernel messages that have been around for years now. Yes, it won't know anything other than it's got an address, but that should be enough for online/offline. Lastly, I have a question, but this is a generic DBus one really. As I said earlier, dhcpcd has NM functionality. dhcpcd-dbus [2] also exists so that this information can be sent around in the current IPC flavour and dhcpcd-gtk [3] listens to it and has a fancy online/offline icon. So taking this as a given, can we have a generic, non NM specific, non dhcpcd specific dbus interface for applications to use that provides 1) overall network status - online/offline/carrier (query and signal) 2) enumerate all network interfaces with an address (query) 3) signal address addition/removal on interfaces I think that's more than enough info for an application to work out if it's "online" or not. And if this is possible, how do two installed applications "own" it? I think we can assume only one is running at a given time - running dhcpcd-5 as a full daemon AND NM is kinda silly and pointless :) Thanks Roy [1] http://roy.marples.name/projects/dhcpcd [2] http://roy.marples.name/projects/dhcpcd-dbus [3] http://roy.marples.name/projects/dhcpcd-ui _______________________________________________ NetworkManager-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/networkmanager-list
