[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#919619: network-manager: should support iwd as wpasupplicant alternative

[Andreas Henriksson]

Hi,

On Thu, Nov 07, 2019 at 12:21:45AM +0100, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> Please relax to only _recommend_ wpasupplicant, to allow (even if not 
> recommend) use with IWD.

Since iwd 1.0 is now out, it should (hopefully) atleast provide a stable
(dbus) interface. Here's my updated view on things related to NM with my
personal view of severity in brackets:

- iwd support in NM is still immature (minor features that I would
  count as essential missing, eg. NM still actively refuse to connect
  to hidden SSIDs with iwd backend. No way to provision hidden networks,
  many other similar missing features which might not be used by all but
  is critical for a connection for some.) [minor]
- NM upstream developers seems still very hesitant to support iwd at
  all, e.g. last I talked to them they still think NOTHING is a better
  fallback than falling back on iwd if wpasupplicant is not
  available/installed. Recent upstream comments like "those unfortunate
  enough to run IWD" doesn't give me confidence they'll change they're
  about to change their mind very soon either. [major]
- debian kernel options still missing to be able to use iwd with
  WPA2 Enterprise networks. (And no idea about status of NM with iwd and
  Enterprise networks.) [medium]

At this point in time I personally find it hard to argue for supporting
using NM without having wpasupplicant installed (in favour of iwd).
The extra support burden for people who blindly install without
recommends simply isn't worth it. IMHO a better option would be to
eventually just add iwd as an alternative on the wpasupplicant
dependency (but I don't think we're quite there yet either).
Those that want to use iwd (with NM), still need to manually configure
NM and while doing so stopping/disabling the wpasupplicant service
(while keeping it installed in case of emergencies) isn't a big extra
burden IMHO.

Once using iwd can actually be considered to "just work" for common
operations I'm all for getting rid of the wpasupplicant baggage, but for
now I think efforts are needed (mainly) in NM upstream to get there. (Help
welcome! ;-P)

PS. The required kernel option has now atleast been discussed with
debian kernel team, but unfortunately I find it quite depressing that
their latest feedback was that they say they don't have time to enable a
single Kconfig option (off -> module). I have no idea why shipping yet
another module would be something they would have to think so hard about
or why enabling the option would take more time than talk about it.

.oO( So close, but yet so far away.... )

Regards,
Andreas Henriksson