[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#567125: network-manager: Requires Dell-specific utility without dependency/recommendation

[Mark Brown]

Package: network-manager
Version: 0.7.2-2
Severity: important

On startup on my Dell E4300 laptop NetworkManager reports:

Jan 27 14:23:13 finisterre NetworkManager: <WARN> killswitch_getpower_reply(): Error getting killswitch power: dellWirelessCtl (/usr/bin/dellWirelessCtl) not available or executable.
Jan 27 14:23:13 finisterre NetworkManager: <info>  Wireless now disabled by radio killswitch

rendering the WiFi unusable with NetworkManager, which is clearly
undesirable.  This behaviour was introduced by a recent system upgrade,
though unfortunately I have not diagnosed what specifically introduced
it.  Network Manager does not visibly appear to recommend or suggest a
package which may include this dellWirelessCtl utility, and I can't seem
to locate a package in Debian which includes it.

The requirement for this utility appears to be spurious since the kernel
rfkill subsystem already exposes the rfkill switch on the laptop and
hooks it up to the WiFi adaptor:

[ 9878.291615] iwlagn 0000:0c:00.0: RF_KILL bit toggled to disable radio.

so nothing other than the standard kernel interfaces should be required
in order to provide rfkill functionality on the system.

Severity important since this kills WiFi functionality on a fairly large
group of machines.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-trunk-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages network-manager depends on:
ii  adduser                       3.112      add and remove users and groups
ii  dbus                          1.2.16-2   simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  dhcp3-client                  3.1.3-2    DHCP client
ii  hal                           0.5.14-1   Hardware Abstraction Layer
ii  ifupdown                      0.6.9      high level tools to configure netw
ii  libc6                         2.10.2-5   Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  libdbus-1-3                   1.2.16-2   simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2              0.82-2     simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libgcrypt11                   1.4.5-1    LGPL Crypto library - runtime libr
ii  libglib2.0-0                  2.22.4-1   The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgnutls26                   2.8.5-2    the GNU TLS library - runtime libr
ii  libhal1                       0.5.14-1   Hardware Abstraction Layer - share
ii  libnl1                        1.1-5      library for dealing with netlink s
ii  libnm-glib0                   0.7.2-2    network management framework (GLib
pn  libnm-util1                   <none>     (no description available)
ii  libpolkit-dbus2               0.9-4      library for accessing PolicyKit vi
ii  libpolkit2                    0.9-4      library for accessing PolicyKit
ii  libudev0                      150-2      libudev shared library
ii  libuuid1                      2.16.2-0   Universally Unique ID library
ii  lsb-base                      3.2-23     Linux Standard Base 3.2 init scrip
ii  wpasupplicant                 0.6.9-3    client support for WPA and WPA2 (I

Versions of packages network-manager recommends:
pn  dnsmasq-base                  <none>     (no description available)
ii  iptables                      1.4.6-2    administration tools for packet fi
ii  network-manager-gnome         0.7.2-2    network management framework (GNOM
ii  policykit                     0.9-4      framework for managing administrat
pn  ppp                           <none>     (no description available)

Versions of packages network-manager suggests:
ii  avahi-autoipd                 0.6.25-3   Avahi IPv4LL network address confi

-- no debconf information