[PATCH] elektrified wpa_supplicant

[Jouni Malinen]

On Thu, Jun 02, 2005 at 02:25:03AM +0100, Pedro Ramalhais wrote:

> IMHO i think the configuration tool shouldn't be inside the application 
> itself. Since it's a daemon, you don't want all that config handling 
> code to be residing in memory when it's rarely used. Most people create 
> their configs and rarely change them.

wpa_supplicant "configuration" may need to change even when the user is
not doing this explicitly. For example, EAP-FAST updates keying material
automatically and this data needs to be stored somewhere. Consequently,
wpa_supplicant needs to be able to store data no matter how the
configuration database is maintained and using the same mechanism for
storing both the network configuration and automatically provisioned
keying material sounds like a good way to do this.

> As i said above, i would prefer the configuration to be handled outside 
> wpa_supplicant and would probably simplify the whole thing. My idea is 
> that any application can make use of the data in wireless profiles. 
> Think xsupplicant or distribution specific network/wireless config 
> tools. The keyword here is interoperability.

If multiple programs are going to use the same configuration data, there
would need to be some kind of mechanism for making sure that the
configuration profile is compatible. In other words, this sounds like
something that is requiring more coordination (i.e., more work) and I
don't know whether the end result would be worth this extra effort.

> Same reason here. You're thinking of the wpa_supplicant configuration as 
> it's own data, which most of it isn't really. SSID's, keys, passphrases, 
> BSSID's, etc... this belongs to OS/network/wireless configuration, so 
> the editing shouldn't be handled by the daemon. It could, but i would 
> prefer to see OS configuration to be done directly on the system-wide 
> "registry" instead of having to interface with wpa_supplicant (which 
> would have a specific configuration system).

Are you saying that there should be some kind of system wide
configuration tool that would take care of all configuration, i.e., it
would need to know details of all programs running on the system. For
example, in case of wpa_supplicant, it would need to know how to get
scan results and fill in defaults for a new network block.

I don't see all Linux distributions standardizing on a single
configuration tool any time soon and as such, it sounds like quite a bit
less work to maintain one GUI tool for wpa_supplicant which includes
configuration management that can be used with all existing
distributions..

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA