Re: Back to technical discussion? Yes! (was: network-manager as default? No!)
On Mon, Apr 04, 2011 at 07:33:31PM +0530, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le lundi 04 avril 2011 à 10:39 -0300, Ben Armstrong a écrit :
> > But the average laptop user really does have a hard time with the
> > status quo. Something needs to change in the next release.
>
> I think squeeze already does a lot better, but there is still work to
> do, especially with the installation process.
>
> On my personal wishlist for wheezy is d-i actually calling NM behind the
> scenes to configure the network, instead of ifupdown. I’ll definitely
> try to find time to hack on this.
I'm not well-familiar with NM. I'm more familiar with wicd. I do feel NM
has some shortcomings for my habits:
(Please feel free to correct me where I'm factually incorrect. I
probably am)
It does have system-global config file. But the settings are not
expected to be there. By default the settings are expected to be in the
user directory (has this changed since 0.8?). So I won't easily find it
when I want to e.g. change configuration as root. This is unlike wicd
that keeps everything under /etc/wicd .
The configuration file is a simple, readable and intiutive text file
(ini-file. No XML or such nonsense). Some documentation and examples
would help.
What bothers me, though, is that each entry requires a unique
identifier field. Which makes it all too easy to make copy&paste
errors.
The command-line interface (nmcli) seems to be rather usable from the
little I have played with it.
Another issue I have had with it in the past is debugging. At least in
my experince, troubleshooting generally invloved killing the service and
restarting it in "debug mode". Which is something I would not really
like to instruct a newb. I hope there are better ways to debug it
without killing it.
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