On 26.04.2013 13:45, Sebastian Kügler wrote:
Hi Jan,
On Thursday, April 25, 2013 08:33:22 Jan Grulich wrote:
4) Add support for activities
Why? What use cases do you have in mind? (I'm not saying it's nonsense,
just that it does not directly pop up in front of my virtual eye what
will happen here.)
For example: 1) Home - try to automatically connect to your home wifi
2) Work - automatically connect to VPN
3) Travel - turn off wifi and mobile broadband or
active mobile broadband connection
The fact is, that NetworkManager automatically connects to some
available and configured connection so maybe activities support will be
useless.
That could be very useful. I can also imagine to have it switched off (also
bluetooth, and everything), when you're on a flight or train and want to
conserve battery -- although that should be possible in any activity).
While implementing support for Activities in network management sounds
like a natural thing to do, I'm not sure if it works so well with the
way Activities are used in PA. In PA, users are likely to have way more
activities then just "work" and "home" and also switch between them much
more often, since Activities on PA are useful as a container for each
larger task / topic instead of just one per _context_. Though of course
Activities can be used in both ways in any Plasma Workspace, the way we
designed Activites in PA leans more toward the former.
However if I often switch Activities, I would not want the network
config to change each time.
However, there is another PA feature which seems almost forgotten by now
because nobody worked on it since the end of the basyskom project, but
which I think could work very well with network management: The
Recommendations framework, with its plugin for the detection of context.
If the systems detects "Ah, my information suggests that you're
currently on the train, where there is no WiFi anyway", for example, it
may recommend switching WiFi off (or maybe even doing it automatically),
until GPS information suggests that the user has arrived at her office
or home, where it switches on WiFi again and in the office case
initiates the VPN connection as well.
We currently have all that nice code for the Recommendations engine
which continuously collects information, but which is currently not put
to any real use at all. This would be a good use from my perspective.
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