Re: [Gnewsense-dev] Re: Selecting network-manager or wicd

[Sam Geeraerts]

Paul O'Malley - gnu's not unix - schreef:
> Karl Goetz wrote:
> > It boils down to something like this:
> > network manager is integrated into lots of applications. does wicd work
> > with them? does it break them or 'just' not provide extra features? I'm
> >  /not/ qualified to make the call about nm/wicd. I've used neither
> > recently, and I don't experience the use cases that make the differences
> > relevant.
> > I need feedback from a dozen people (5 would do, but a dozen
> > would be better. More is better.) saying how their daily work does or
> > does not improve using one over the other
> > kk
>
> I have had it work well with atheros hardware.

Works good on the Yeeloong here on a fresh install. I'll remind again 
that NetworkManager finds wifi on my old install, but not on my new 
install. And I'll add that NM on my old install is still the one from 
config.fsf.org, where the one on the new install is our own (from lenny, 
not backports).

> However the question I have is what is the discussion on the Debian 
> mailing lists. Does it have the legs to keep going?

I searched a bit through Debian archives. User reports I found were in 
line with practically everything I've heard about Wicd in the past 2 
years or so: almost exclusively positive reports. Side note: nearly all 
of those comments are made in the context of NetworkManager not working. 
The lacking of reports about the reverse (NM works when Wicd doesn't) is 
of course (at least in part) due to the fact that no distro ships Wicd 
by default (as far as I know).

The Launchpad project pages list 4 active members. Latest release was 
done on 2010-01-15. The last commit to trunk was 12 days ago, but there 
were 20 commits during January so I think development is still pretty 
active.

> It appears to have 84 bugs on its current sourceforge page, some of 
> which should have been closed with "Won't fix" imo.

275 for NetworkManager in GNOME Bugzilla. Not that this is a very good 
metric, because some serious triaging needs to be done there. NM also 
has more widespread use, so naturally gets more bugs reported.

>  From that place two bugs interested me.
> There is a suggestion there that it does not work in cli mode.

Does NM do that? I've only ever interfaced with NM through the applet. 
When I try 'ifconfig wlan0 down' (in GNOME) it's brought right back up 
again automatically by NM. When I log out of GNOME my wifi gets 
disconnected.

> It is not great when the signal strength is low it fails rather than 
> being low speed.

When my Yeeloong is shielded by my CRT screen next to it, both NM and 
Wicd tell me they are connected but I can't even get a ping packet 
through. I haven't experienced any differences in connectivity between 
them so far.

With respect to usability NM is better because it is better integrated 
into GNOME and has a cleaner UI, Wicd looks a bit less mature. One thing 
I really like about Wicd is that you have to connect to a wifi network 
explicitly.

> All this and more needs to be taken into consideration before a commit 
> is made. Remember the deltas I mentioned recently, well this would be 
> one of them!

Wicd needs only one package from backports. NetworkManager from 
backports needs at least also libgtk, libglib and gtk2-engines-pixbuf. 
The maintenance delta is more than just the number of packages that 
differ, but it looks to me like the delta for Wicd really is less.