Future of KNM/PNM with NM 0.9

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hey,

On Monday, May 02, 2011 13:49:48 Raymond Wooninck wrote:
> Well, I guess that it comes down in the end to cripple Gnome 3.0 or to
> cripple  KDE Network Manager.

Yes, essentially the two become mutually exclusive. I'm not happy with it 
either, but I lack time and energy to keep chasing NetworkManager. The 0.7 
transition was already painful, now this one seems to double the pain. 

To be plain honest, I'm much more concerned about the user experience in 
Plasma than the one in GNOME3. Sure it would be nice if it would just work 
with both, but the NetworkManager devs decided that compability is not 
important to them and have moved on.

This is a problem across multiple distros btw, the RedHat people have the same 
problem, so they started working on 0.9 support. To my knowledge, that work 
isn't finished as of yet, so we don't have much options.

> Vincent indicated that they require NM 0.9 because of the enhancements to
> the  Gnome desktop.  KDE however has a crippled KNM/PNM with NM0.9, but at
> least can work.

... for a very limited amount of use-cases, and without any kind of serious 
testing. Most likely case is that it just will break, and that reporting bugs 
is useless because the code is too much in flux and the problem is not about 
knowing bugs, but about finding the time to fix them.

> Based on the progress of Gnome 3, I don't think that it would be realistic
> to  expect that the whole world will wait with NM 0.9 until KDE is ready.

I think it's at least reasonable to expect to not break network management 
setup on your default desktop.

A problem here is that it's simply very unrealistic to have full and tested 
support available without any kind of grace period, especially with an API 
that changes so often, in so fundamental ways.

The delays caused by that are something we'll have to live with.

> As said before for me it is strange to see that still a lot of effort is
> being  put into enhancing KNM/PNM for the usage with NM 0.8.

I'm not surprised, it's what most people are currently using. And I'd rather 
have one stable system than two or three that all have major issues. If that 
means sticking to 0.8 until 0.9 support is rock-solid, I don't mind.

Bottom line: whoever wants 0.9 support will have to pitch in with patches.

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

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