Some months ago, on the road to Ubuntu Maverick, a new system indicator, network (with connman as a backend), started to be developed. The plan was to get it into UNE and release it with no notifcation area. Unfortunately it didn't make it into the final version. However, continued efforts are still being made to improve it, and I'm getting regular updates.
From a blueprint from the last UDS, I read that the plan was to ship no notification area and only indicators. For that, it was defined that nm-applet (backend: NetworkManager) should be ported to the appindicator library.
Today I discovered that those efforts are going on and a initial version is available for testing, available from Matt Trudel PPA (Natty only).
So, my questions is, to whoever has the necessary info: wouldn't it be easier to join efforts and concentrate the work in just one version (probably NetworkManager backend, as that's the official plan), instead of breaking those efforts apart and hampering both testing and developing? Both indicators are being developed by Canonical engineers, and that really doesn't make much sense.
So, any Canonical engineer willing to clarify this?
Best Answer
The conman indicator is the long term plan, the network manager indicator is the short term stop gap. there are concerns conman has some missing features which are important to some use cases and that's why development continues.
Although I just don't see why the desired features in conman weren't ported to nm.