WPA support in NetworkManager

[Scott James Remnant]

On Sat, 2006-03-04 at 14:09 -0700, Andrew Jorgensen wrote:

> NetworkManager 0.6.0 has just been released and now supports WPA
> (through wpa-supplicant).  This is a big deal for me and I imagine
> will be a big deal to enterprise customers as well.  Would it be
> reasonable to get this version into Dapper?  Would that require
> approving an exception to the version freeze or is this covered under
> the general gnome exception?
> 
It isn't covered by the general GNOME exception because it's not part of
the GNOME platform, desktop, etc.

I also do not believe it is reasonable to put this version into Dapper,
and would not recommend an exception to the version freeze.

  http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/NetworkManager/NEWS?rev=1.8&view=markup

While I can't disagree WPA is a "nice to have", it isn't something that
NetworkManager provides itself; it still relies on wpa_supplicant, which
is currently in universe. 

  wpa_supplicant would require promotion to main.

NetworkManager also has gained additional dependencies, specifically
libnl, a generic netlink library.  This is not currently available in
Ubuntu.

  libnl would require packaging.
  libnl would require promotion to main.

NetworkManager has been rearchitectured and refactored.  We currently
ship a fairly large patch which makes it integrate better with the
current way we do networking and DNS management.

  this patch would have to be completely rewritten.

This patch also touches the VPN managers, and adds new VPN modules.  We
currently disable these because they are not well integrated with the
rest of the system.

  we would have to learn these managers, and either do the work to
  integrate them or disable them.

There's a new look, and new behaviour for the nm-applet.  I haven't even
seen screenshots of this, so can't begin to identify what would need to
be changed.

  we may have to tweak the new UI.
  all existing screenshots would be wrong.
  UserInterfaceFreeze is only two days away, it would most likely need
  an exception for that *as well*.


That's a hell of a lot of work for a new release.  Were it just a point
release with useful fixes, it'd be worth considering.  Maybe if it was a
new release that *only* introduced WPA support, we could think about an
exception.

But as it stands, there's just too much work to do to introduce NM 0.6
to dapper, and make sure it works before we release.


Our primary use case for the network-magic spec was "get NM into dapper"
because it's been dropped from the past three releases already because
we tried to get too much of it working before we accepted it.

This time we've done the opposite, we've only tried to make sure it's
core functionality works; that way it's *in* dapper and we can think
about extending its functionality in dapper+1

Scott
-- 
Scott James Remnant
scott at ubuntu.com
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