[patch] remove wireless support

[Owen Fraser-Green]

Hi,

On Thu, 2004-06-03 at 20:43, David Zeuthen wrote:
> so has Owen. And I don't think this means we need to add writable
> properties, if the app is that complex it'd better use a dedicated
> library to interact with the device.

I'm won over. I agree wholeheartedly.

> We shouldn't underestimate whether something is convenient or not,
> after all I think we all agree that one of the major goals is to make
> it easy to use devices. And especially if the information we want to
> export is just a pain to get from a unprivileged app running in a
> desktop session, let's provide it then. And if it can save us from
> having to run Yet Another Daemon to just check for this property (like
> network link state), let's discuss whether it should be included or
> not. For something like wireless networking, that might just hurt us
> more because it would be a pain to support it since we'd have to do
> all kinds of tricks to avoid the burst of callouts and message
> emissions. So, the cost of having this, already, debatable set of
> properties greatly offset the benefits. So, Robert, please apply your
> patch to remove it.

On this though, I must say I'm a little disappointed. I'm disappointed
because I feel there are valid use cases which call for the wireless
detection. Granted, the burst of callouts is a problem, but then either
include an attribute for muting emissions for such properties, or just
remove those ones. Here's an example use case:

I have a laptop with a wired ethernet port and a built-in wlan device. I
use it in five environments:

1) When I'm at work I dock the laptop, effectively putting another
ethernet device on the PCI bus and use that one.
2) When I'm at one of my customers, I plug a network cable into the
built-in ethernet port.
3) When I'm at other customers I use no network.
4) When I'm at home I use a wireless network with the ESSID "Discobabe"
5) When I'm at a friends house I connect to a wireless network with the
ESSID "x5".

Today, I'm forever switching around settings or putting up with "FAILED"
messages during boot up and it's annoying. With HAL+wireless one could
easily write a program which looked at all the net.ethernet capable
devices, checked their net.ethernet.link status and, in the case of
wireless networks looked at the ESSID's and then called some much more
intelligent program which really understood how to manipulate network
devices to chose the right one. Note also that I can easily switch
between these without rebooting so it demands HAL otherwise it's going
to be Yet Another Dæmon with polling and callouts and the such.

I'm sorry if I'm flogging a dead horse on this one - I know it takes up
a lot of time thinking things over and over and going round in circles -
but to me, at least some of the wireless patch just make sense.

Cheers,
Owen



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