discussion/tracker: overall strategy for systemd-networkd support (alternative to NetworkManager)

[jokeyrhyme]

My use case is that my system does not have NetworkManager ( https://www.networkmanager.dev/ ) at all, rather my system uses systemd-networkd ( https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd-networkd.html )

There are enough different components that touch NetworkManager that I figured it might be useful to collect these all together in one issue/thread here:

• https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-applets
• https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-greeter
• https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-settings
• https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-settings-daemon
• https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-settings-subscriptions
• https://github.com/pop-os/dbus-settings-bindings

I previously raised an issue for this ( pop-os/cosmic-applets#304 ), but that was only against one of the above

I did raise one PR already ( pop-os/cosmic-greeter#129 ), but I think it'd be better to understand the overall strategy here so that the compatibility abstraction can be done in one place (or as few places as possible)

Update: I've started work on https://gitlab.com/jokeyrhyme/nm-dbus-proxy-rs

[alphabitserial]

I would also like to see support for this!

[M00NJ]

I would also like to see support for this!

+1 :)

[jokeyrhyme]

I'm contemplating creating a separate proxy service that exposes the NetworkManager D-Bus API and translates those calls to the systemd-networkd D-Bus/varlink API

That way, many projects beyond COSMIC can benefit without having to change a single line of code

[jokeyrhyme]

I've started work on https://gitlab.com/jokeyrhyme/nm-dbus-proxy-rs

It's very far from actually being useful, but I've hard-coded just enough to display "ethernet" connectivity on cosmic-greeter, so I think the approach is generally feasible for simple things

My first goal is to get cosmic-greeter and cosmic-applet-network displaying the correct network status icon (not any other information, initially) by passing through information from systemd-networkd

Anyhow, I don't know how much time I'll have to work on this, especially during the week, but I'm very open to contributions

If this ends up being functional and popular, perhaps we can convince the systemd project to adopt it?

[jokeyrhyme]

Well, it's still far from complete, but I've begun weaving in real information from systemd-networkd: https://gitlab.com/jokeyrhyme/nm-dbus-proxy-rs

cosmic-greeter and cosmic-applet-network both display "some" indication of connectivity even though the connectivity type is usually wrong for now :)

[Curious-r]

cosmic-applet-network contains WiFi option, if use systemd-networkd, maybe it need to support iwd and wpa_supplicant?