Comment 11 for bug 586033

I investigated this and I think I found multiple issues.

First of all, connman doesn't include the network manager interface in
/etc/dbus-1/system.d/connman.conf. This meant that applications were
not allowed to query network state through network-manager
compatibility interface. Unless network-manager still was installed
for some reason, then applications should be able to access connman's
compatibility interface.

Second problem was that connman didn't send StatusChanged signals when
the network state changed and that's why applications didn't notice
the state change. I sent a patch upstream:

http://lists.connman.net/pipermail/connman/2011-January/003315.html

Let's see if they take it or not.

With these two fixes the applications should work better now, at least
I was able to improvements with pidgin and firefox.

I noticed that thunderbird had problems detecting network, both with
connman and network-manager. I found bug #384749, so this is a common
problem in thunderbird (ie. not specific to connman) and decided not
to investigate any further at this time.

Unfortunately there are still problems with empathy. It does have
support for both network-manager and connman, but it detects on
compile time which one to enable. This is totally braindead, the check
should be runtime. And the network-manager part uses libnm and I
assume libnm doesn't work with connman for some reason. I filed bug
#704387 to handle the empathy problem.

I need still to investigate what to do with applications using libnm.
Unfortunately there are more applications than just empathy which use
libnm to check the network state.