Re: NetworkManager instead of Wicd in ‘%desktop-services’?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Mark,

Mark H Weaver <address@hidden> skribis:

> I've been using Network Manager with GNOME for several months at least,
> and generally I find it works very well, and reconnects much more
> quickly than wicd.

Good.

> However, there is one annoying bug: every time I reboot the system, the
> first 1-3 times it connects to the network, name lookups do not work.  I
> always have to manually ask Network Manager to disconnect, and then
> reconnect.  Sometimes I have to do this two or three times before name
> lookups work.  After I've done this, it works perfectly until the next
> reboot.
>
> I looked into this a bit, but haven't yet found the cause.  When name
> lookups are failing, /etc/resolv.conf exists and is correctly
> configured.  I've tried restarting 'nscd', but it doesn't help.

Weird.  (I’ve installed GuixSD/GNOME/NM on a laptop that’s almost always
on a wired network and it doesn’t have this problem AFAIK.)

Could you enable nscd debugging output, so we can at least see whether
the problem is due to nscd caching name lookup failures?  Something
like:

       (modify-services %desktop-services
         (nscd-service-type config
                            => (nscd-configuration
                                (inherit config)
                                (debug-level 3)
                                (log-file "/var/log/nscd.log"))))

>> Now, as someone who doesn’t use GNOME, I wonder if NM would work well
>> for me.  Last time I tried it’s CLI was too low-level to be usable, and
>> I don’t remember seeing a curses interface.  Suggestions?
>
> There is a curses interface included with Network Manager.  It's called
> 'nmtui'.  It's not getting built because it depends on 'newt', which is
> not an input to our Network Manager package.

Nice.  The attached patch adds this dependency, changing the closure
size from 356 MiB to 360, which I think is reasonable:

diff --git a/gnu/packages/gnome.scm b/gnu/packages/gnome.scm
index 931c50e9d..d9d3fe793 100644
--- a/gnu/packages/gnome.scm
+++ b/gnu/packages/gnome.scm
@@ -109,6 +109,7 @@
   #:use-module (gnu packages rdesktop)
   #:use-module (gnu packages scanner)
   #:use-module (gnu packages selinux)
+  #:use-module (gnu packages slang)
   #:use-module (gnu packages ssh)
   #:use-module (gnu packages xml)
   #:use-module (gnu packages gl)
@@ -4967,6 +4968,7 @@ users.")
        ("libnl" ,libnl)
        ("libsoup" ,libsoup)
        ("modem-manager" ,modem-manager)
+       ("newt" ,newt)                       ;for the 'nmtui' console interface
        ("polkit" ,polkit)
        ("ppp" ,ppp)
        ("readline" ,readline)

OK to apply?

Thanks,
Ludo’.