System connections

[Will Stephenson]

On Saturday 08 August 2009 12:13:19 Ramon Antonio Parada wrote:
> Hello,
> I'm testing from subversion. Wanted to create system-wide connection
> but option never appears enabled. Is that option implementd?
>
> I executed:
>
> rap at neonlight:~$ sudo polkit-auth --grant
> org.freedesktop.network-manager-settings.system.modify --user "rap"
>
> rap at neonlight:~$ polkit-auth --show-obtainable | grep network
> rap at neonlight:~$ polkit-auth --user rap | grep network
> org.freedesktop.network-manager-settings.system.modify

Hi Ramon

I'm aware of this feature but I have never investigated how it works.   
Personally I plan to get the core features working then look at doing system-
wide connections.  I assume it's just a matter of getting that privilege and 
then sending the connection over dbus to the NMSystemSettings service, plus a 
bit of special casing so that secrets are not saved to the users' KWallet.

If you're interested in hacking on it, feel free!

> Also... I love the new design. Well, I would put that in the plasmoid
> and kill the system tray and move "Enable wireless" from context menu
> to the Network Management control module to make it even simpler but
> sometimes it's hard to see usability in KDE so congratulations.

The system tray is basically an interim solution until we get all the 
QGraphicsView bugs and Plasma/kded crashers out of the plasmoid.  

Having said that, I admit that I do have a fondness for the system tray app 
approach, because I suck[1] at doing complex stuff with QGV (see the prior 
plasmoid impl), and I am somewhat afraid that it will remain a huge lump of 
complex code making Plasma slow to start and unstable.  Sebas is working to 
prove me wrong at the moment.

The process of making the KDE UIs independent of NetworkManager is also a 
challenge.  The new design is backend-independent in theory, but we have not 
implemented any mechanism for statically or dynamically using alternate 
backends - both knetworkmanager and the plasmoid's KDED module are currently 
hard-coded to use the NetworkManager backend, and the config UI is built using 
a lot of NM headers for enum values and strings currently.

Will

[1] Meaning: I am too aware that there are many non-graphical problems 
remaining to be fixed that I can fix while others use their QGV skills.  
Still, it's my prejudice :).