Quoting Andrey Rahmatullin (2020-07-12 20:00:23) > On Sun, Jul 12, 2020 at 08:29:08PM +0300, Andrei POPESCU wrote: > > > Network-Manager needing wpa-supplicant in _most_ situations is a reason > > > to _recommend_ it not a reason to _depend_ on it, per Debian Policy! > > > > If Network Manager needs to depend on the wireless component, that could > > probably be: > > > > Depends: wpasupplicant | iwd > As discussed in the bug report linked earlier, this can only work if NM > supports iwd by default, which it currently doesn't and apparently isn't > going to.
Yes: Network Manager needs a _specific_ wireless component for _specific_ network management tasks. It would therefore be wrong for network-manager do declare a fallback dependency on iwd because network-manager cannot (reliably or at all) use iwd the same way as it uses wpa-supplicant. What is (unusual¹ but) usable, however, is to *not* use Network Manager for wifi, but use IWD+systemd or IWD standalone for wifi, and use Network Manager to manage _other_ network components. In such unusual-but-real setup, wpa-supplicant would be dead weight. Lightweight, arguably, but a daemon and therefore additional risk of hair-pulling confusions: If wpa-supplicant daemon is running, IWD fails to work. Simpler if possible to avoid having wpa-supplicant installed on systems where wpa-supplicant is never used anyway: On Debian² you can only remove the wpa-supplicant if you also remove network-manager - which I find is an unnecessary tight coupling. - Jonas ¹ Debian Policy § 7.2 says that packages needed "in all but unusual installations" should be _recommended_ not depended on. ² Using equivs is not Debian but a slight fork of Debian. -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private
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