Hi,

recently I was upgrading a workstation running buster to bullseye from
remote.  This box had a fixed IP set in /etc/network/interfaces.  After
a rebooting I've "lost" the machine and I had to check the machine
physicaly.  It was asking for a totally different IP address via DHCP.
I found out that connman was installed on this machine due to lxde
metapackage Recommends.  After simply purging connman which is not used
anyway all went fine on this machine.

I would have loved to track this down in more detail but this
workstation is mission critical and there is no option to bother users
with fiddling around on the system that is now running as expected
again.  I'm fine with digging in the logs if you tell me what kind of
information is needed.

Kind regards
    Andreas.

Hi,

I'd like to draw the attention of debian-devel to the problem below
(reported ad bug #994875) which breaks certain systems on upgrades.

As I described in bug #988696 which boils down to my last message to
this bug report where I wrote "No idea how to configure network easily
after fresh lxde install."  This means:  Even an experienced user like
me does not obviously find easy access to a very important feature of a
fresh installation to login to a network.

My reason to bring this up on debian devel is that I have the feeling
that while we provide lots of different desktops in dedicated images the
general QA how useful these might be is left to the maintainers of this
desktop who probably have a focussed view and do not realise what
hurdles newcomers might need to take.

My other point is that we here have another case where the freedom of
choice of tools to use leads to non-default behaviour.  I simply assumed
that network-manager would be some kind of default and if it would be
used in lxde task those two problems would not have happened.  So my
suggestion is to propose some set of default tools for every desktop
environment we are providing and network configuration should be part of
it.  (I admit I also had trouble with wicd which until some point of
time was installed as default with xfce4 installer media - no idea
whether this is the case any more - my arguing would be the same here.)

Kind regards

     Andreas.

PS: I also CCed debian-desktop list.  If you feel the discussion
    should happen there please CC me since I'm not subscribed to
    that list.

The missing icon in the status bar triggered bug #988696.  I personally
consider this very unfriendly to new users.

Kind regards

     Andreas.

Hi,

Andreas Tille <andreas@fam-tille.de> wrote (Thu, 23 Sep 2021 07:20:57 +0200):

LXDE is one of the light-weighted desktops, and LXDE is not Gnome.
So, if you add gnome-network-manager to the LXDE task, how much of Gnome will
be pulled in via dependencies?
This might be an argument pro connman.

I have just installed an LXDE system to test this, and now adding
network-manager-gnome, installs 24 new packages, taking 39 MB of additional
disk space, according to the apt-get output (the whole LXDE system having
3,4 GB of disk space used).

I guess this would be worth it.


What do others think? LXDE people?


Holger

Hi,

Sure.  That was the reason why I had choosen this as desktop for quite some
old hardware.

From my point of view it is bearable.

I'm more about memory usage than disk space usage.  IMHO 39MB for something
that works in contrast to saving space that is hard to use or even might
break a system under some circumstances is a sensible tradeof.

I agree here (may be removing connman saves some extra space again (probably
not much).


Kind regards

       Andreas.

Is there a reason why to choose gnome-network-manager over something like
nm-tray for LXDE?

Jaycee

Am 23.09.21 um 21:35 schrieb Jaycee Santos:

I think nm-tray (being based on Qt5) is a reasonable choice for LXQT
(which is also Qt5 based). LXDE on the other hand uses GTK, so I think
network-manager-gnome is a better fit there. (both disk footprint and
memory usage wise)

Ah. My apologies. I thought nm-applet was provided by nm-tray. I was wrong.
I did not know that nm-applet was part of network-manager-gnome!

So I agree with network-manager-gnome being a better fit for LXDE.
Apparently, I was already using it.

Jaycee

Hi,

as far as I remember connman ignores /etc/network/interfaces by design.

Lxde metapackage in buster recommends wicd which is not available in bullseye due to the deprecation of python 2.
Therefore lxde metapackage in bullseye recommends connman-gtk (connman).

Cheers,
Amy

Am 23.09.21 um 20:17 schrieb Holger Wansing:
I might consider splitting off network-manager's /usr/share/locale into
an (optional, Recommends/Suggests) network-manager-l10n package. The
locales take up about 8,5 MB of disk space.
While I don't necessarily think that 8,5 MB are actually that much of an
issue for desktop installations, trimming down the on disk footprint
might make network-manager more suitable for more constrained environments.

There is also a (somewhat stale) MR [1] for network-manager asking for
the individual plugins to be split into separate packages to make it
possible to trim down the dependency chain.

If there is real demand for it, we could revisit that.


Michael

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/utopia-team/network-manager/-/merge_requests/4

Hi Michael,

I agree that 8.5MB are not much these days but if it helps to accept
network-manager as a unique default this would probably a sensible step.
this sounds good.

Kind regards

      Andreas.