[Dextrose] Dextrose 2 patches report

[Jerry Vonau]

On Mon, 2011-12-05 at 19:23 +0100, Sascha Silbe wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> this is the list of Dextrose 2 patches that we still apply to the Sugar
> packages in Dextrose 3 (i.e. that have been neither successfully
> upstreamed nor dropped):
> 
> 
< snip >

> 22. Make sure Adhoc is Sugar-Adhoc (unknown author)
> 
>     I've only recently understood what the purpose of this patch is:
>     NetworkManager supports several different ways to handle address
>     allocation and routing for ad-hoc networks. The "default" Sugar
>     ad-hoc networks (the channel 1 / 6 / 11 icons) use the 'link-local'
>     method, but for accessing internet via an ad-hoc network created
>     using the "Share 3g connection" feature we need a different one.
> 

Yes, defaulting to link-local before trying dhcp is a major stumbling
block. You could have a dhcp server on the ad-hoc network and sugar
never tries to use it unlike when you switch over gnome, where it all
works fine.  

>     The best thing to do would be to put the wireless interface into
>     AP mode for sharing, rather than using the ambiguous ad-hoc mode.
>     Unfortunately, a lot of wireless network drivers, including the
>     libertas driver as shipped in OLPC and upstream kernels, don't
>     support AP mode.
> 

Can we try to use dhcp first? What would be a safe timeout to fallback
to link-local? Or at least have a tick box in network-control-panel to
choose between the two methods? 

>     We should try to upstream this patch to make Sugar mainline capable
>     of using a connection created by the (currently) Dextrose-specific
>     "Share 3g connection" feature.

Does this offer anything better than using Network-Manager to share the
connection?

Jerry