Re: Best place to discuss other lightweight libraries?

[Kurt H Maier <khm-lists@intma.in>]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 09:47:24AM -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> 
> 1. Choosing which network to connect to.
> 2. Managing keys.
> 3. Logic for what to do when signal is lost.
> 4. Automating nonsense click-through agreements on public wifi.
> ...

wpa_supplicant can do 1., unless you mean choosing between ethernet and
wifi.  but it supports priority weighting on access points..

2. is pretty trivial since you can easily wpa_cli >> /etc/wpa.conf or 
similar.  I've never been sure why typing 'dhclient eth0' is seen as
more onerous than running a polling daemon to save you the trouble.

Can you elucidate more on 3?  if the signal is lost, wpa_supplicant
rescans and connects to any configured network, or else sleeps and
rescans later.

4. will never be solved satisfactorally, since that garbage is not
predictable.  the database of tedious TOS crap will never stop
expanding.

> 1. No way to manage network priority/preference order.

wpa_supplicant has priority= to do this.

> 2. Annoying popups to ask for key rather than having it be part of the
> configuration of the network, and storing the keys in obscure places.

What is less obscure than the wpa_supplicant config file?

> 3. Annoying network-hopping.

this can also be fixed with priority= 

> 4. Minimal or no auto-click-through; even when it does work, you can
> get burned if your web browser happens to attempt a load before it
> succeeds. A correct one needs to encapsulate the connection somehow so
> that no connection is exposed to the user at all until the
> click-through succeeds.

There are lots of useful things that can be done with this concept of an
encapsulated connection.  I get burned by this on my work laptop, which
likes to spam VPN connection attempts back to corporate.

khm