[patch] wireless patch, take 2

[David Zeuthen]

On Thu, 2004-05-27 at 13:29 -0400, Joe Shaw wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-05-27 at 18:42 +0200, David Zeuthen wrote:
> > Some rambling: we probably want to complicate the implementation a bit
> > more like this
> > 
> >  /etc/hal/methods.d/Net/Ethernet/80211/SetEssId
> > 
> > where SetEssId probably is a symlink and the client invokes the method
> > SetEssId on the interface org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Net.Ethernet.80211.
> 
> A symlink to what?  /etc/hal/property.d/essid-change.sh or something?

Njah just to somewhere in /usr/libexec or what's it called nowadays. One
shouldn't really place binaries or scripts in /etc, right? The stuff in
methods.d will have a slightly different format than in properties.d so
you can probably reuse the same stuff there..

> My only concern about the separate methods is that HAL should probably
> still call out even if the ESSID changes out from underneath HAL.
> 

Yeah, that will happen. The maintenance of distro-specific files should
be in the the property.d such that if the ess is changed from e.g. a
shell, the right things happen.

> > One way it still feels a bit to me like feature-creep, but OTOH it's a
> > very nice way of providing infrastructure for using devices. We'd have
> > to be careful though not to abuse this though, e.g. it would be tempting
> > to provide a GetPhotos method on the org.freedesktop.org.Device.Camera
> > interface that returns the picture as a base64 encoded string :-). Oh
> > well.
> 
> Yeah, it feels kind of gross to me because now we're adding all this
> additional API that people have to learn, when we already have a nice
> property system with just get and set, and we can define all the
> properties pretty cleanly in the spec.  The dbus security features are
> tempting, but is it worth it?
> 

It might be, not sure really. It's not easy to predict anything, but
there might be situations in the future where this is needed. One could
also think of it as a facility for using devices where the actual usage
is OS-dependent but the interface is not. And as discussed a few weeks
back we probably want only the user.* property namespace writable (and
per-user) for non-root users, so writing to .ess_id would be a no no.

Hmm,
David




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