Why does PackageKit depend on NetworkManager?

Dan Williams dcbw at redhat.com
Wed Aug 27 03:36:05 UTC 2008


On Tue, 2008-08-26 at 23:00 -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-08-27 at 14:51 +1200, Martin Langhoff wrote:
> > Is there anything preventing PK from connecting to the network over
> > non-NM-controlled network interfaces?
> > 
> > (I am not using PackageKit facilities, just surprised at the dependencies...)
> 
> It depends on NetworkManager-glib, not NetworkManager.  And it does so
> to check the status of the network connection before checking for
> updates.  I believe that if NetworkManager doesn't respond (because
> you're bringing up your network some other way), it will continue on as
> though the connection is said to be up by NM.

Right, that's the way it should work.  If talking to NM fails, the app
should either (a) assume a connection, or (b) could be more intelligent
by asking SIOCGIFCONF/netlink for interfaces, and if at least one
interface is IFF_UP | IFF_RUNNING and has an IP address, then try.

But only by using NM can PK really do things like "don't update while on
3G" and such which would be quite a bit more difficult without NM.

Dan




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