0.6.0 package

Upstream Version Freeze has already passed.

0.6.0 will not be packaged for dapper, and instead will be part of dapper+1

Yes, I understand that yet network-manager is an absolute necessity for
laptop users and WPA is an absolute necessity for corporate networks.

Won't you consider making a one-time exception for this? Dapper is
still, at least, a month away.

The goal of dapper has never been to offer new features, it has always been to simply improve and stabilise on what was present in breezy for the purposes of long-term support.

Both wpasupplicant and xsupplicant are available in universe for people using those security systems.

As I understand things, WPA is considered deprecated in favour of 802.11i now anyway, so on the dapper support timeframe, it doesn't seem worth rushing network-manager support for a deprecated protocol.

Where 0.5.1 to 0.6 a simple change, I would consider it; but it's almost a total rewrite from what I can tell, so it cannot be considered this close to release.

OK. As I said before, I totally understand your point of view it's just that Dapper's network-manager only supports WEP and we all know that sucks so having support for WPA would be great so I gave it a try.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Something to look forward to in dapper+1 :)

WPA may be deprecated, but its still widely used. and WEP is totally insecure. I know a lot of networks that i wont be able to join with an ubuntu notebook (while still having network manager), and it seems both FC and opensuse will have NM 0.6 in their release that will be out in the dapper timeframe, so thats a big downside for dapper and ubuntu. (imho)

Does the upgrade need a lot of dependancies ? If so, it's perfectly understandable that we cannot make an exeption.

If not, and as it's not part of the default install (AFAIK), it maybe worth looking at it.

I think deferring 0.6.0 will make a dent in network-magic.
Scenario: “Yes Sir, there is wireless access in the conference hall”, „Good that there is this wireless thingie now... I'm clearly seeing the network ... passphrase not accepted, bollocks...”

I'd like to add that the latest gnome-power-manager package available in Dapper is based in the CVS version from three days ago. Can't something like this be done with network-manager? g-p-m is also in version freeze but that hasn't stopped the maintainer from getting a CVS version.

I too agree that WPA is very much something you should consider adding. If you did a quick "wpa" search in the forums or even the ML, you'll see that there are no shortage of people who depend on WPA.

I guess we will have it in dapper-updates or through the backports.

On Sat, 2006-03-04 at 14:09 -0700, Andrew Jorgensen wrote:

> NetworkManager 0.6.0 has just been released and now supports WPA
> (through wpa-supplicant). This is a big deal for me and I imagine
> will be a big deal to enterprise customers as well. Would it be
> reasonable to get this version into Dapper? Would that require
> approving an exception to the version freeze or is this covered under
> the general gnome exception?
>
It isn't covered by the general GNOME exception because it's not part of
the GNOME platform, desktop, etc.

I also do not believe it is reasonable to put this version into Dapper,
and would not recommend an exception to the version freeze.

  http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/NetworkManager/NEWS?rev=1.8&view=markup

While I can't disagree WPA is a "nice to have", it isn't something that
NetworkManager provides itself; it still relies on wpa_supplicant, which
is currently in universe.

  wpa_supplicant would require promotion to main.

NetworkManager also has gained additional dependencies, specifically
libnl, a generic netlink library. This is not currently available in
Ubuntu.

  libnl would require packaging.
  libnl would require promotion to main.

NetworkManager has been rearchitectured and refactored. We currently
ship a fairly large patch which makes it integrate better with the
current way we do networking and DNS management.

  this patch would have to be completely rewritten.

This patch also touches the VPN managers, and adds new VPN modules. We
currently disable these because they are not well integrated with the
rest of the system.

  we would have to learn these managers, and either do the work to
  integrate them or disable them.

There's a new look, and new behaviour for the nm-applet. I haven't even
seen screenshots of this, so can't begin to identify what would need to
be changed.

  we may have to tweak the new UI.
  all existing screenshots would be wrong.
  UserInterfaceFreeze is only two days away, it would most likely need
  an exception for that *as well*.

That's a hell of a lot of work for a new release. Were it just a point
release with useful fixes, it'd be worth considering. Maybe if it was a
new release that *only* introduced WPA support, we could think about an
exception.

But as it stands, there's just too much work to do to introduce NM 0.6
to dapper, and make sure it works before we release.

Our primary use case for the network-magic spec was "get NM into dapper"
because it's been dropped from the past three releases already because
we tried to get too much of it working before we accepted it.

This time we've done the opposite, we've only tried to make sure it's
core functionality works; that way it's *in* dapper and we can think
about extending its functionality in dapper+1

Scott
--
Scott James Remnant
<email address hidden>

Well, as disappointing as this is, I wanted to thank you, Scott, for the very thorough explanation.

So, Thanks.

> As I understand things, WPA is considered deprecated in favour of 802.11i
> now anyway, so on the dapper support timeframe, it doesn't seem worth
> rushing network-manager support for a deprecated protocol.

For you information, NetworkManager 0.6.0 has supports for 802.11i aka WPA2.
I just hope there will be an easy way to use it in dapper, as I wanted to convert my roomates to Ubuntu and the wifi is protected by WPA2.
For me it was a must-have, what should be done to have in non-main ?

Thanks

> For me it was a must-have, what should be done to have in non-main ?

A miracle.

Since Dapper is meant to be the Vista competitor it is sad to hear that a laptop running it won't be able to join a WPA network and is forced to use an other os.. WPA was one main reason for looking foward to Dapper release as I assumed it'll include the latest NM version. Really sad..

I don't suppose it's possible the no-0.60-in-Dapper decision will be reconsidered in light of the 6 week extension announced?

It has been and the decision is still no. However: community-contributed
packages might be accepted and there are several community members
already working on it.

It has been reconsidered. I'm working on 0.6 packages now.

Cool! Are you using the work ion_ and Pygi (sorry, I know only their IRC
nicks) as base?

I'm using their work, yes; merging it into the work I'd been doing myself.

You are my hero. :-)