We would like to make a PR against network-manager to expose nmcli as an executable through a content interface.
Would this be accepted and if not, why not. It seems like a very obvious use-case for other snaps to use instead of trying to bundle nmcli in each snap that needs it.
Thanks.
@futuretim we have had discussions about this in the past, not only about nmcli but also about other tools controlling deamons, like bluetoothctl. In general, we prefer to offer just the dBus interface, which is meant to be used programmatically. That is not the case for nmcli, so you can find that suddenly its output format changes and grepping does not work anymore, etc. Also, for nmcli you would need to share through the interface not only the binary but the library dependencies, and in the end things can get more complex than expected, hitting a maintenance cost.
I can understand that using nmcli can make things easier, but for that we encourage using stage-snaps to include the network-manager snap from the right channel and then priming the nmcli bits, so compatibility with the NM snap is assured.
OK. Thanks for the reply.
