[Kde-hardware-devel] networkstatus

[Will Stephenson]

Hi Waldo, list.  I'm glad to be a part of the team :).

On Thursday 05 January 2006 19:33, Bastian, Waldo wrote:
> >Hi Waldo,
> >
> >Le Jeudi 5 Janvier 2006 01:41, Bastian, Waldo a écrit :
> >> Is the networkstatus module from kdepim/networkstatus to be included as
> >> part of Solid?
> >
> >To be honest I have no clear plan about kdepim/networkstatus, simply
> >because I didn't find time yet to look at it in details.
> >
> >AFAIK, some parts could be reused but IIRC some of them are specific to
> >some PIM needs (please correct me if I'm wrong). If I'm not mistaken, that
> >means that it could partly migrate to kdelibs (where our main library will
> >be) and hopefully the remaining bits will be simpler to implement.
> >
> >As I said for networkstatus my plans are not very clear yet (I'm currently
> >dealing with lower level stuff), but feel free to give me more information
> >or advices, it'll be very valuable IMHO.
>
> I think the PIM needs are for a large part representative of the needs of
> network oriented applications in general. At the time it was introduced
> into CVS it was added to kdepim in order to meet release dependencies
> (kdepim didn't want to rely on the latest kdelibs) but it is my
> understanding that it can move to kdelibs for KDE 4.0.
>
> Will Stephenson should be able to comment.

As Waldo says, it's only in pim for organisational reasons.  The functionality 
is not in any way pim specific.  We can move it to kdelibs when the time is 
right.  

To summarise what we have at the moment:

*) networkstatus is a kded module
*) it is a high level interface to network status information.  This means it 
does not know anything about specific interfaces, wired/wireless, IP details.
*) it has 2 functions
*) - interface to find out "Is there a network?".  This works by polling kded 
over DCOP, and via DCOP signals
*) - interface to asynchronously request a network connection (over DCOP), and 
receive notification when the network is available.

Currently the interface is a bit more powerful than the implementations - we 
envisaged being able to request "Give me a connection to host XYZ" so that if 
a VPN or specific interface is required for that host, it can be started.  
However, we don't have a network infrastructure that can do that yet.

The network provider that supports networkstatus at the moment is SUSE's 
smpppd + kinternet system.

Feel free to ask if any of that is unclear.