[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#491826: better handling of situations where network-manager does not manage all interfaces

[Martin Steigerwald]

Package: network-manager
Version: 0.6.6-2
Severity: normal

If Network Manager does not handle all interfaces currently it reports
offline for network status when none of the interfaces it manages is
online.

This is just plain incorrect. Currently Network Manager does not seem to
have a clue whether interfaces that are not managed by it are on- or
offline. So it shouldn't pretend to know whether the network in itself
is on- or offline in this case. If it doesn't know it should tell so and
let applications decide what to make of it.

Or it should - at users option maybe - make an educated guess. If a
default route and DNS servers are configured, Network Manager IMHO can
assume that the network is online. At least if the user tells it to use
that approximation.

This problem gets more and more serious, the more application rely
solely on Network Manager regarding network status information (which
IMHO is a bug in itself). I filed a bug report for Iceweasel 3.0.1
already:

http://bugs.debian.org/491822

There are several related bugs:

- http://bugs.debian.org/436181, http://bugs.debian.org/431427,
http://bugs.debian.org/415891, http://bugs.debian.org/408292: network
manager and static configurations

- http://bugs.debian.org/355478: Conflicts with other packages 
which manage the network

In the related Firefox 3 bug report Dan Williams proposes an
all-or-nothing scenario for network manager:

- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=424626#c6
- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=424626#c41

I dare to disagree on that at least as long as I can not be convinced
that Network Manager is the perfect tool for all my network needs.

I currently still prefer to use guessnet and ifplugd on eth0, partly
cause I did not yet setup a DHCP server on my ASUS WL-500g Premium
Debian based DSL router. But I like to use Network Manager with WLAN.
guessnet detects my routers IP and MAC address and then eth0 is
configured statically. Yes, once I setup dnsmasq this would no longer be
required.

But then there are people who use connections that are unsupported by
Network Manager like UMTS and special PPP configuration or what not.

I think if Network Manager finds that it does not manage all interfaces
it should at least report "unknown" as network status. Or the semantic
of that report should be "the interfaces *I* manage are offline" and it
would be up to the application to handle this.

Especially with Firefox 3 thats currently really annoying. I do not like
software patronizing me that way cause I like to decide how I setup my
network. I would like to use Network Manager but as long as using it
causes me more problems than it solves I may just leave it disabled
usually.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (400, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.25.10-tp42-toi-3.0-rc7 (PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=de_DE at euro, LC_CTYPE=de_DE at euro (charmap=ISO-8859-15)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages network-manager depends on:
ii  adduser                       3.108      add and remove users and groups
ii  dbus                          1.2.1-2    simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  dhcdbd                        3.0-4      D-Bus interface to the ISC DHCP cl
ii  hal                           0.5.11-2   Hardware Abstraction Layer
ii  ifupdown                      0.6.8+nmu1 high level tools to configure netw
ii  iproute                       20080417-1 networking and traffic control too
ii  libc6                         2.7-10     GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libdbus-1-3                   1.2.1-2    simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2              0.76-1     simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libgcrypt11                   1.4.1-1    LGPL Crypto library - runtime libr
ii  libglib2.0-0                  2.16.3-2   The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgpg-error0                 1.4-2      library for common error values an
ii  libhal1                       0.5.11-2   Hardware Abstraction Layer - share
ii  libiw29                       29-1       Wireless tools - library
ii  libnl1                        1.1-2      library for dealing with netlink s
ii  libnm-util0                   0.6.6-2    network management framework (shar
ii  lsb-base                      3.2-12     Linux Standard Base 3.2 init scrip
ii  wpasupplicant                 0.6.3-2    Client support for WPA and WPA2 (I

Versions of packages network-manager recommends:
ii  network-manager-kde           1:0.2.2-1  KDE systray applet for controlling

-- no debconf information