[Mageia-dev] Drakxnet, drakroam and Draknetcenter : let's fix it or throw it.

Thomas Lottmann skipercooker at gmail.com
Tue Aug 2 10:56:55 CEST 2011


You are right in several points, but... :-)

Le 01/08/2011 15:59, Thierry Vignaud a écrit :
> On 1 August 2011 15:29, Thomas Lottmann<skipercooker at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> The other main issue I see si that Drakxnet is coded in Perl and uses a lot
>> of perl scripts, like the drakxtools. This makes it hard to maintain, and to
>> improve.
> That's just your own POV.
> Not the POV of maintainers.

Are there other maintainers for this tool than it's creators or 
long-time maintainers? This is not only my POV, but also what I have 
heard from a variety of people since the time I participate a little. 
Anyway...

>> I know it works fine for several people. Personally, I am often having
>> issues because it's disconnects on it's own,
> This has nothing to do with drakconnect that don't handle that.
> If the network disconnected, that's the issue between the routers,
> the network, the kernel, ....
> and no longer sees any networks when it should.
> which points to either network issue or kernel driver issue, not drakconnect.

Other people not using Mageia do not get as often disconnected as me 
when using public hotspots. Mageia wireless tools seem to have more 
difficulty to connect and keep the connections to hotspots that have a 
low (not bad, low) quality signal, while Windows keeps connected, or, 
quickly reconnects automatically.

Meanwhile, I have to reconnect manually and, more frustrating, it seems 
the wireless utility sometime attempts to reconnect automatically, but I 
can't clearly know.

The other bizarre thing I often see is when the hotspots he sees fall 
from 35 to 0 (or 1, the hotspot he's tryign to connect). This is not 
normal, I have not observed this NM, Windows or Mac OS X tools.

>
>> Then it has difficulty  reconnecting.
> Same, reconnecting is the job of dhcp-client, ifplugd and the like.
> Not drakconnect's job.

I can't tell. I can only observe and I do not invent what I describe 
(and have already described in the past). :-)

>> Windows, Fedora and Ubuntu's wireless tools work absolutely smoothly at my
>> school. And now, other people testing Mageia as school are having the same
>> issues I have. This is frustrating and I can assure you these home-made
>> network tools have to be improved and fixed.
> Well, Fedora tool (really NM) has its own bugs.
True.
> And I'm pretty sure people who've used MS, Apple or whatever OS/tool
> they're used to, have also encountered issues
True. But these issues are less evident to find apparently, and do not 
affect that much user experience.

When a user wants to connect to a wireless hotspot, he should just click 
connect, enter his IDs and it should work fluently. If it is often the 
case with Mageia tools with a personal hotspot and when you're next to 
it, it is not always the case when you use it everyday, and, sadly, 
other tools do better and have a more stable and smooth wireless  
connectivity, even if they also encournter issues. Their issues are not 
that much affecting user experience like the ones I have described.
>> If you want to, I can attempt to make a list of the isses and incoherencies
>> I find, although they are not hard to see.
> Indeed, please just fill in _several_ bugs (one report per issue)
> against drakx-net

I will do one report for each issue I find in drakxnet, with as much 
details as possible, yes. I shall also do a video capture of the issue 
if it can help. this will take me a lot of time, but I will do it.

>> But as I mentionned earlier, this
>> is a tool that is hard to maintain, and I cannot learn perl right now.
> That's just _your_ personnal though, not his maintainer's.
> aka "this is a tool that is hard to maintain" really means "you would not be
> able to maintain it"
Right.
>> If NetworkManager is easier to maintain and works fine, then I think it can
>> be a better solution. Just offering or trying to find solutions, because
>> this tool seriously does not work properly here.
> it has its own flaws too...
Yes, but it does not confuses itself with it's own configuration files. 
Clearly, all programs can have flaws, but sincerely, it is not working 
well in Mageia and is not pleasant to use. Otherwise I would not report 
again about it. ;-)


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