On Sat, Aug 15, 2015 at 06:19:23PM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, 16 Aug 2015 00:08:11 +0200
> shraptor <shraptor@???> wrote:
> > I would be interested in
> >
> > * No-dbus replacement for NetworkManager/Wicd
> >
> > Are you thinking a C program?
>
> HECK no! There's no requirement for this program to be fast, and I want
> to make it easy on myself. Python probably, with the minimum Python
> addons, and only addons that ship with Python itself.
>
> If people really hate the Python dependency (I thought almost everyone
> installs Python anyway), perhaps I could make it out of shellscripts,
> awk and the like.

> >
> > daemon and user interface/GUI separation?
>
> I'm not sure whether an actual daemon would be needed, but either way,
> the user interface would be a separate program from the thing that
> reveals the wifi transmitters, deals with wpa-supplicant and iwlist,
> etc. I'd probably make one curses interface, and one GUI. I *might*
> even do them with dialog and zenity.
>
> But I'd need *a lot* more people wanting it to do it. The way Devuan
> does Wicd right now means making this program isn't personally urgent.

I've written something along these lines myself about a year ago.

It's wpa_config, a shell script for wireless configuration.
Mostly, it modifies the wpa_supplicant configuration directly.

For a backend, it uses wpa_cli; for a frontend, it uses dialog or clones
that are adequately compatible (whiptail or Xdialog, though the latter
isn't really maintained at present).

It was actually written to accompany an init script that would launch
wpa_supplicant and handle DHCP properly, while not making the init scripts
hang waiting for wireless; the (limited) documentation all explains how to
use the init script, rather than how to use the configuration tool.
Contrary to what one might infer from the notes, wpa_config should work
with any way of starting wpa_supplicant with /var/run/wpa_supplicant/
as the control-interface directory.

Long story short: it's limited, somewhat odd in interface, and nearly
undocumented.
But if you've configured wpa_supplicant to start, or need to write an
initial config file, it should be adequate if you can follow the UI.
I tried to make the UI as obvious as possible, but I'm the only user
I'm aware of, so no promises ;-).

The full git tree is at:
https://github.com/idunham/wpanet

The script in question is:
https://github.com/idunham/wpanet/blob/master/tools/wpa_config


HTH,
Isaac Dunham