Re: Best place to discuss other lightweight libraries?

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

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 10:37:39PM -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> 
> Because you don't have a keyboard, you have a 3-4" touchscreen. And
> you want it to keep working as you move from place to place without
> any interaction.
> 

If you don't have a keyboard, you likely also don't have physical
ethernet via rj-45, and even if you do, there's no reason to spam
wakeups checking if it's plugged in.  touch-only devices have touch-only
interfaces, which can easily include a 'switch to wired' button instead
of a daemon eating your battery.

setting physical links aside, wpa_supplicant can manage roaming fine.  I
should clarify that I think wpa_supplicant could do with a massive
wrecking ball, but it has a lot of good functionality that obviates a
ton of overengineered networkmanager-type software.  The trick will be
removing the garbage or implementing the good stuff in a slightly less
horrendous fashion.

In fact, I'm firmly of the opinion that complete signal loss is the
*only* time a system should monkey with the network; one of my least
favorite things is my phone aggressively dropping 3G so it can switch
to wifi, dumping my ssh sessions and filesystem mounts in the process. 

> Agree, but it still needs to be solved, even if the solution requires
> frequent updates to be fully effective. With decent heuristics though
> I think it could be fully automated for most sites with just a few
> exceptions for really weird ones..

I think the ideal solution is for network administrators to stop
pretending hijacking sessions is acceptable, but until an automated
solution exists I enjoy all the hate they get from users.

> Agreed. I think really most users should _always_ be running in an
> environment where only root sees the real network interfaces and
> applications just see a virtual network routed through the real one.

This doesn't necessarily solve anything from the user's standpoint
unless he's trained to use the feature appropriately, but it would
enable system designers to get uncomfortably clever in ways that can
make system behavior damn hard to predict.  Having said that, there is
software available on plan 9 called aan - 'any available network' - that
works this way and can be very useful.

khm