net.interface_up and unimplemented net.80203 properties (linux)

[David Zeuthen]

On Mon, 2007-03-12 at 02:22 -0700, Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
> Which is essentially what I'm doing, but some extra functionality in
> HAL would be useful for this.  I want to get away from the
> NetworkManager daemon; adding it as a dependency for my application
> defeats the purpose of my application, as my app implements most of
> what the NM daemon does (just in a much less over-engineered way; not
> that I'm trying to rip on NM here: it's a great piece of software,
> just a bit large for my taste).

While I agree with Dann that your efforts is better spend at improving
NetworkManager, sure, we shouldn't nor can't force you to do that.

> Regardless, IMO my point still stands: forcing users to install and run
> a large appliction such as NetworkManager (and dhcdbd) to be able to use
> apps that need proper HAL support for network interfaces is a bit silly
> when a < 500-line HAL addon plus a couple scripts will suffice.
> 
> I'm perfectly ok with keeping my HAL addon with my app, which will get
> installed with scripts and .fdi files to enable the functionality I
> need.  I'm merely hoping that it might be deemed possibly-useful to
> other users of HAL.  This is the first time I've worked with HAL so
> closely, and I wanted to test the waters first before coming up with a
> patch.

Isn't it possible to do today what you need just as HAL addon? I mean,
an addon is really just a daemon tied to a specific device that takes
over a name space, e.g. it maintains properties

 com.example.myapp.*

and provides D-Bus methods and signals on

 com.example.MyApp

So, for network management, I'd expect that you can get away with
providing methods such as 

 com.example.MyApp.BringUp (type=[dhcp,static], <other details>

and populate

 com.example.myapp.interface_is_up
 com.example.myapp.interface_type
 com.example.myapp.interface_ipv4_address
 com.example.myapp.interface_ipv6_address
 ...

and so on (I'm just making these up). Doesn't that work?

     David