Future of KNM/PNM with NM 0.9

[Raymond Wooninck]

Hi Lamarque,

I understand your position and the email was not only directed to you. Fedora 
(Dan Williams) did two things in order to keep PNM working with NM 0.9. The 
first thing is that he created a compatibility layer (the so called f15-patch) 
to keep changes minimal. 

Furthermore he created two patches for KDE. One is for kde-workspace and the 
other one is for PNM. Both of them are in the f15 branch of NM. With these two 
patches PNM is working. I have to admit it is far from ideal, but at least 
things seems to work. Network Connections are reported, Existing user 
connections can be used, etc. 

As that openSUSE:Factory is moving to NM 0.9 I applied these two patches 
against my own build of kdebase-workspace and PNM with the above mentioned 
result. 

I have now created a patch for kdebase-workspace that reverts your patch to 
the disable the build of the NetworkManager backend, which I guess I will use 
for the KDE:Unstable:SC repo. 

I just wanted to raise the attention to this point as that it seems a lot of 
new stuff is being build for a NetworkManager version that will be soon out of 
support and it looks like that KDE 4.7 has to be able to work with NM 0.9

Regards

Raymond
On Friday 29 April 2011 19:40:25 Lamarque Vieira Souza wrote:
> Em Friday 29 April 2011, Raymond Wooninck escreveu:
> > Will, Sebas, Lamarque,
> 
> 	Hi,
> 
> > I indicated yesterday to Vincent Untz that he could push NM 0.9 into
> > Factory and that we would apply the patches from Dan Williams.
> > 
> > It seems however that a different direction has been chosen for the
> > current KDE trunk (KDE:Unstable:SC). As soon as I update this repo to
> > the current version, then kdebase-workspace will no longer build the
> > Solid support for Network Management. This literally means that the
> > plasmoid-networkmanagement no longer will show any network devices.
> 
> 	The current Solid::Control::Network* classes from kde-workspace does not
> compile against NM-0.9, so I changed the cmake config file to do not try to
> compile against NM-0.9. You can compile them against NM-0.8 and use it with
> NM-0.9, but several things are not going to work and I have heard that users
> keep getting bogus notifications from
> Solid::Control::NetworkManager::notifier() when you do that.
> 
> > In practice this would mean that users are forced to start using the
> > NM-applet if they want to run KDE:Unstable:SC together with Factory.
> > 
> > As that  there is absolutely no indication yet when KNM/PNM will support
> > NM 0.9, I wonder if it wouldn't have been better to create the option
> > that if kdebase-workspace detects NM0.9 to activate the patch from Dan
> > Williams to have at least some support. I know that it wasn't optimal,
> > but it was definitely way better than nothing.
> 
> 	Which patch is that? Is it a patch against NM or KDE's Solid?
> 
> > I would like to know which way we are really going as that I have to
> > prepare KDE:Unstable:SC also for NM0.9 and it would be very funny to
> > start putting in dependencies to de-install PNM and install
> > NetworkManager-gnome. However at the moment, this seems to be the
> > direction we are going.
> 
> 	I, for one, am not working on NM-0.9 support for now. I created a new
> branch for networkmanagement (Plasma NM) in
> git://anongit.kde.org/networkmanagement/nm09 for anyone wanting to work on
> NM-0.9 support. I usually just cherry-pick commits from master branch and
> fix the conflicts that arises to keep the code compiling. I have never
> added NM-0.9 specific features nor have ever tested the code. The code in
> there works only with NM-0.9 and when compiled against the NM-0.8 Solid's
> backend, weird, I know.
> 
> 	I have a lot of other things to work on NM-0.8 support and I am starting
> a 3-months paid job next week so I am going to spend little time with KDE
> during that period. I really like to work on KDE and Plasma NM in special,
> but I am unemployed since last year so I need that job.
> 
> 	The current situation is like this: someone must create a new backend
> directory git://anongit.kde.org/kde-workspace/solid/networkmanager-0.9 and
> update it to work with NM-0.9. One big problem is that the interface classes
> in git://anongit.kde.org/kde-workspace/libs/solid/control/*/* does not
> completely fit with the new NM-0.9 specification. So we could:
> 
> 	1. Create the NM-0.9 backend in networkmanagement (Plasma NM) repository
> instead of kde-workspace. We would have to creat a new namespace different
> from Solid::Control to do not clash with the old backends for NetworkManager
> and ModemManager.
> 
> 	2. Create the NM-0.9 backend in kde-workspace repository and just drop
> support for what do not fit. I guess that would keep the NM-0.9 backend on
> par with the NM-0.8 backend in reggarding NM-0.9 support. This would means
> we would have to add changes to the backend during KDE's feature freeze and
> maybe during KDE SC 4.7.x life cycle. KDE rarely do that.
> 
> 	I prefer option #1. Anyway, that is a big task and I really do not have
> time for it now and I am going to have even less free time in the next
> months. I really need help, a lot of help.