[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#919619: Bug#919619: NM 1.24.0 now has basic support for hidden networks with iwd backend

[Andreas Henriksson]

Hello,

On Sun, Jul 12, 2020 at 05:39:19PM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> I understand that neither you nor Andreas consider current release of 
> IWD a _recommended_ alternative for wpa-supplicant.  That is a good 
> reason to not depend on or recommend iwd.

I think iwd itself (since >= 1.2, so not the version in buster) has
reached production quality. The problem here is the iwd backend in *NM*
which is not production quality and actively discuraged by NM upstream!

Please note that the iwd backend is not even *compiled* by default!
(This is a debian deviation and I'm sure if you give Michael enough
grief about this he'll reconsider and go back to upstream
recommendations of not even building the IWD backend.)

> 
> I do not understand, however, why you will not relax relationship on 
> wpa-supplicant to recommend it instead of depending on it.

Because there's no benefit in doing it, while there's a massive
support burden. There's a massive amount of clueless users who
blatantly configure recommends to not be installed and any application
that has as many users as NM will be hit with a floodwave of support
requests over it. From being involved in the GNOME team we know
it's simply not possible. You haven't offered to do the work, but
if you're willing then start out by triaging the existing bug reports!
Talk is cheap, etc, etc.

> 
> There are use-cases of network-manager without wpa-supplicant, when 
> either wifi is not used, or when IWD is used instead.

Nothing prevents you from using iwd (while having wpasupplicant
installed).

If you feel you must get rid of wpasupplicant (why?), then here are a
few options:
* use equivs to create a dummy replacement
* recompile NM packaging with wpasupplicant dependency changed
  (You could even contribute a patch which does this using
  build-profiles so you can rebuild without any changes to the source
  package!)
* use dpkg exclude features to get wpasupplicant packages files not
  unpacked on your system while the package gets installed.
* realize that wpasupplicant is small and useful to have as a fallback
  if something ever goes wrong.

You seem to just argue over a theoretical supremacy idea, while
not even trying to describe which practical problem you're trying to
solve.

> 
> Again, I do understand that such use-cases are not _recommended_ but 
> they are still _possible_ and _wanted_ for some unusual situations.  

Yes, it's still possible. So go do it!
FFS I'm using it myself right now! It is certainly possible.

Better yet start improving the NM iwd backend so that it becomes better.
Maybe some day NM upstream will even reconsider and have it compiled by
default (it comes with zero new build-time dependencies after all).
After that they might even automatically fall back on using iwd without
requiring manual configuration.

> Debian Policy says to use Recommends: not Depends: for such relations.

This is your interpretation.

Please understand that the Debian project still has not managed to
produce a way to turn mailinglist discussions into working code.

The way to reach your goal is to improve the code by debugging current
bugs (which there are quite a bunch of in the iwd backend of NM) and
submitting patches upstream. As already mentioned, the debian packaging
of NM is already ahead of the game on being cutting edge w.r.t. iwd.

The ball is really in your court! If you want to support widespread
iwd usage, then improve the code!

This is the last time I'm repeating myself on this topic....
I've tried to keep this bug report up to date with latest information
of progress, but I'm not sure if I find the motivation for even that.
I will however repeat what I said last time: There are no progress being
made anymore on the iwd backend in NM! Noone is working on improving it!
Thus don't expect progress to be made, unless you contribute!
You should likely expect the next step to be that the code is removed
upstream given the current state of things unless someone (this means YOU!)
steps up and starts improving it!

Regards,
Andreas Henriksson