NetworkManager system-wide use

[Philip Prindeville]

Dan Williams wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-05-26 at 06:19 +0000, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>   
>> FYI, I found this while browsing the accepted SoC applications:
>> http://code.google.com/soc/gentoo/appinfo.html?csaid=1875FC7DA1FE03E4
>>
>>     
>>> If this is completed, work should be done on WiFi key handling: currently,
>>> NetworkManager will ask the user for the WEP or WPA key of the wireless
>>> network it connects to every time it connects, which isn't very
>>> user-friendly. As Gentoo allows one to configure wireless network settings
>>> in /etc/conf.d/wireless, the keys could be retrieved from that file. Some
>>> changes to NetworkManager's core will be necessary to support this though,
>>> which implies one can't be sure it'll be accepted by the core maintainers.
>>>       
>> Looks like you can take this off your TODO. :-)
>>     
>
> Sort of...  We've already got plans in this area, but of course if
> somebody else wants to fix it, that's great :)
>
> http://live.gnome.org/NetworkManagerToDo?action=show
>
> See the top item there.  We're not necessarily going to be pulling keys
> from config files here; instead it will be a slightly larger scoped
> solution.  The idea here is to do it right, not just hack in a shim over
> the existing (somewhat-broken shellscript hacktower hell) config stuff
> that many distros already have.
>
> Dan
>   

Sorry for the slight digression, but can someone explain to me why
NetworkManager has a dependency on wpa_supplicant?  Not all
wireless networks use WEP/WPA (some are wide open).  Further,
not all networked machines (like my desktop) have Wireless NIC's.

It would seem to be an unnecessary (and unfounded) dependency.

-Philip

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