Dan Williams a écrit : > if NM is not managing your default internet connection, then you > should probably turn NM off when setting up the machine.
This "take it or leave it" philosophy is quite disappointing. > But the core problem is that network management is a *system-wide* > problem, and you can't just write one component and call it a day. The > policy needs to make informed choices based on the entire network state > of the machine. And the configuration of all the network connections > needs to be in *one* place, with *one* format, not spread around in 3 > different locations because you're trying to put 2 or 3 connection > managers on the same machine. There should only be one connection > manager running at any given time, or else you've just (a) doubled your > work and QA, and (b) made it suck for users because configuration is > split up, and (c) behavior is different than they expect. In an ideal world this is definitely what you want, but the reality unfortunately often departs from this. No matter your (impressive) efforts, NM will by nature always be catching up with the latest technologies or new fancy ways people configure their network. And we do not even know if there will be enough will and development manpower to make NM compatible with every latest connectivity invention. So I think assuming NM will always know about everything in the system is not realistic. There will always be exceptions. If your answer to this is "not supported, not interested, bye", then it is quite disappointing (but the mere existence of "NM_CONTROLLED=no" suggests otherwise). An alternative answer is: "graceful degradation". That is: if you really think you know everything, then fine be the Oracle. But otherwise be more modest and reduce the number of features _without_ getting rid of all of them! About this more specific "online/offline" issue, you must consider that there was a time before NetworkManager even existed, and that there are systems where NM will probably never run on. Because of this legacy, every single network application and every single end user is assuming "online" status by default and prepared to catch possible network errors. In other words, everyone is prepared to deal with wrong online status. On the other hand, no one is prepared to handle wrong offline status (how could that be?). When NM sees "NM_CONTROLLED=no", reporting "offline" or "online" are admittedly both lies (the accurate answer is "unknown"). But there is a huge difference. Reporting "online" is a lie that everyone is used to live with since ages, whereas reporting "offline" is a lie that breaks everything. Pick one. Making the simple easy AND the complex possible sometimes costs more, but in this simple, specific case I really doubt it. NM is great for many OTHER features than just (abusively) reporting offline status, and I fail to see why users should give up on all these other great features just because they sometimes want to connect using a connection not controlled by NetworkManager. > Why do we have more than one program that controls 3G connections? Because it is Linux, not Windows. It is a free country, take it or leave it? > There's a lot more to the problem than online/offline. Well, you can design beautiful and advanced software architecture(s) with multiple modules exchanging very fine-grained connection information, I still think this will never change anything to the simple online/offline problem described above. Cheers, Marc _______________________________________________ NetworkManager-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/networkmanager-list
