Netcfg git releases and testing

Question

Note: Any bug reports are best on the bug tracker. I occasionally lose track of bugs reported via the forum, or they just get mixed into other issues.
Hi
The release beta cycle wasn't working well for netcfg. Small changes, bugs and many FR's got held up far too long while other work happened. To try and help get netcfg development going smoothly again I've uploaded some netcfg git PKGBUILDs  to the AUR to use instead of -beta releases.
This way I can make those small changes, push it to git, and it can be tested immediately, while larger things can be safely done in another branch locally. When it's ready, rc's will be released.
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=23953
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=23954
There's some fairly substantial changes in this release.
- Moving from net-tools to iproute
     - iproute is the way forward. net-tools is long unmaintained, nor as capable.
- Moving from wireless_tools to pure wpa_supplicant
     - More reliable, less quirks required. Hopefully more stable.
     - As part of this, wireless moves into netcfg-wireless (dependency issues)
Both of these require config changes. Once they're both stabilised I can release 2.2.x to give people time to migrate, and eventually 2.5 which will use them by default. There are example configs included.
More details on the wiki: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Net … evelopment
The wpa_supplicant move needs a significant amount of testing. I havn't tested WEP (testing hardware is gone), and net-auto may not work presently. WPA and custom WPA configs work in my testing.
If there's any criticisms or comments about the way this is going, the code, netcfg, etc, please let me know. I'd like to make 2.2 a good release and I think these changes are important. I'm hoping they'll make netcfg simpler and more reliable.
Cheers,
James

Answer 1

Hi James,
So today I tried netcfg-git with netcfg-wireless-git.
My old config is still working as expected but I'm not sure you're very interested in that
I wanted to try the new wireless-dbus stuff but failed. To be honest, as a simple user (read no coding skills, rather minimal understanding of networks), I wished I could find some more documentation about this new version.
Don't misunderstand me, I find your examples + wiki pages very good additions but for the first time since I'm using netcfg, with the new changes, I have to say I was very confused. We have the wireless-dbus-wpa file, the wireless-dbus-wpa-config file, wpa_supplicant.conf. First thought was: ok, profile+config file+wpa_supplicant.conf, sounds fine, but then I saw many parameters being repeated across the different files, I began to wonder if wireless-dbus-wpa and wireless-dbus-wpa-config were related or 2 different methods. Anyway, no big deal, I edited them all.
Then I saw the move to iproute, but all the examples for wpa use dhcp whereas I'd like to use a static ip. I tried my old settings, I tried to use the settings in ethernet-iproute, not really knowing if what i was doing was even supported or supposed to work.
I'd really like to help with testing and my post may sound dumb but that's what happened. In my opinion, I think that a single example config file with _all_ the options possible would great and more straight forward (+ a mini, even temporary man page).
Finally,the results were:
# netcfg wireless-dbus-wpa
:: wireless-dbus-wpa up                                                                                [BUSY]
- Association/Authentication failed: SCANNING                                               [FAIL]
linux 2.6.28.7
iwl3945
In any case, thanks a lot for your hard work.