Control: severity -1 wishlist Hi,
I think this severity is better as wishlist until iwd 1.0 is released with further details below. On Thu, Jan 17, 2019 at 10:09:21PM +0100, Jonas Smedegaard wrote: > Package: network-manager > Version: 1.14.4-4 > Severity: important [...] > network-manager is compiled with support for iwd, > but the package declares an absolute dependency on wpasupplicant. Please note that from a "debian stable perspective" iwd should still be considered "tech preview". There are no promises about any kind of interface stability until version 1.0 is released (notably the dbus IPC interface which NM uses). See also #911057 related to (the lack of) interface stability promises. There are also a number of features still missing in both iwd and the iwd-plugin of NM before the iwd code-path can compete with and be a full (production-ready) replacement for wpasupplicant. - iwd is still working on implementing support for "complex" wifi setups (and I don't have access to any such networks for testing and evaluation). - network-manager is still missing support for things like connecting to hidden SSIDs while using iwd. Having said all that, iwd should probably work well for most users. (But at the same time I'd also recommend keeping wpasupplicant installed for those cases where you do run into a situation where you can't connect using iwd and has no other connectivity options available.) > > Please add iwd as alternative to wpasupplicant. In support of this statement, I'd like to think of potential drawbacks and try to argue why they aren't problematic. If the dependency was described as 'wpasupplicant | iwd' the only problematic situation I would forsee would be when someone first installed iwd, then later installed NM (and assumed it would drag in the default dependency). Given the total number of users of iwd are currently "almost non-existant" (compared to NM userbase) the cases where the above problem will happen is also thus non-existant. (current numbers according to popcon: 34 installed, 24 vote. See: https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=iwd ) My conclusion is thus that the dependency could likely safely be described as 'wpasupplicant | iwd' to cater for the very small minority (subset) of iwd users who wishes to not have wpasupplicant installed (and prepare for a future where iwd >= 1.0 and NM iwd-plugin is also in better shape). > Also, please consider relaxing to only recommend this combo, > as network-manager is certainly usable without those available, only > (as described when seemingly this was tightened in 0.6.0-1) > "necessary for all encrypted connections." >From my own experience I can tell that there aren't enough volunteers taking on the support burden of downgrading things which could theoretically be recommends instead of depends for very popular and widely used software like NM. There are just too many people still disabling recommends without knowing what they're getting themselves into and then complaining "it's broken". The minority of people who really can't spare the storage space to have wpasupplicant installed while unused (and want to avoid maintaning their own fork of the package) will find the solution here: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/equivs Even if we assume counting the people who want neither would double the number of people who would rather just have iwd, this graph should make it pretty clear why "a minor inconvenience for NM users" far outweighs "a major inconvenience for iwd/none users": https://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=iwd%2Cnetwork-manager&show_vote=on&want_legend=on&want_ticks=on&from_date=&to_date=&hlght_date=&date_fmt=%25Y-%25m&beenhere=1 Even if only 1% (which I'm pretty sure is way to low) of users are in the 'install without recommends and complain'-camp, that's still alot more users than iwd*2. Regards, Andreas Henriksson
