Mark Haney wrote:
Bill Davidsen wrote:
I had actually hoped that the "profiles" stuff might let me have
multiple configurations which work at multiple locations. I have three
locations needing credentials, and I'd like to have a "Starbucks"
configuration which found whatever was available. Doesn't seem to work
that way. :-( Thankfully I know how to write scripts and use iwconfig...
Yeah, it's a saving grace for those of us who have given up on NM.
NM sucks, everyone knows it, so let's can it and move to something that
doesn't.
The reason people think it sucks is that the documentation is missing,
inadequate, or wrong. And when I mentioned this someone told me that
writing documentation is not a good use of developer time, and that's
hogwash. I've done FOSS and commercial development for over thirty
years, and on commercial software there was always a description before
the code was written, and someone writing documentation which was
checked by QA, or for something I was giving away, I wrote my own
because I wanted people to love and use my software. We used to call the
NM approach "if it was hard to code it should be hard to use."
Actually, the documentation issue isn't why I think it sucks. But you
are correct, no/poor/incorrect documentation is BAD. Very bad. I've
been a sysadmin for 12 years now professionally and done a great deal of
programming, I document /everything/ even in the smallest script. It
makes life MUCH easier.
The reason I think it sucks is because it's so erratically unstable and
buggy. I'm all for open source, but implementing a half-baked app like
this for something as important as the network is just foolish. This
also coincides with bad documentation, I've not looked at the code, but
if they don't document the app, is the code undocumented as well? To
me, it seems that that is the case based on the unstable nature of the app.
I was looking for an essay I once had, called "Comments are Documentation, Too."
It undoubtedly came from my youth, when structured programming was still used.
In my search I found a link to "Documentation: Give it up; it won't happen"[1]
and "FLOSS Manuals sprints to build quality free documentation."[2] I hate to
say it, but "quality-free documentation" comes closer to the case here.
The decision to use this is still beyond me...
I would would be ashamed if something I wrote was a constant topic on
this list, had it's own list on how to avoid it, even had people selling
bloody tee shirts which show "NetworkManager" in a circle with a slash
through it, and generated opinions like the "everyone knows it" above.
Actually I exaggerate, the site was selling iron-on sheets for $4, you
had to provide your own shirt, but there must have been some market. I
do believe that a scan of this list indicates it's not just a few people
frustrated by the lack of documentation.
To the person who commented that I "probably never really wrote any ____ing
documentation at all," a number of my articles have been published, you may be
able to find the ones I wrote for _SysAdmin_ magazine a few years ago still online.
[1] http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1005775
[2] http://linux.com/feature/155205
--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
"We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked." - from Slashdot
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