[network-admin] Documentation describes a removed feature (connections tab)

[Vince McIntyre]

Binary package hint: gnome-nettool

running ubuntustudio lucid/i386, up to date as at 2010-04-20.

In the desktop I go to System->Administration->Network.
The gnome-nettool opens. It shows 'General', 'DNS' and 'Hosts' info, all correct.
There is no Connections tab. The help pages are almost entirely devoted to this tab,
so there must be something seriously wrong here.

The interfaces in the machine are shown below.

$ ifconfig -a
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0f:1f:df:66:49
          BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)
          Interrupt:16

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
          inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
          RX packets:93 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:93 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:10065 (10.0 KB) TX bytes:10065 (10.0 KB)

wlan1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:1e:2a:d0:49:db
          inet addr:192.168.13.12 Bcast:192.168.13.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::21e:2aff:fed0:49db/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
          RX packets:16422 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:10450 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:21006929 (21.0 MB) TX bytes:1240665 (1.2 MB)

$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu lucid (development branch)
Release: 10.04
$ apt-cache policy gnome-nettool
gnome-nettool:
  Installed: 2.30.0-0ubuntu1
  Candidate: 2.30.0-0ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 2.30.0-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://au.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: gnome-nettool 2.30.0-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-21.32-generic 2.6.32.11+drm33.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-21-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Tue Apr 20 03:21:05 2010
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-Studio 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" - Beta i386 (20100406.1)
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gnome-nettool

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Unfortunately, we can't fix it because your description didn't include enough information. You may find it helpful to read "How to report bugs effectively" http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html. We'd be grateful if you would then provide a more complete description of the problem. We have instructions on debugging some types of problems at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingProcedures.
At a minimum, we need:
1. the specific steps or actions you took that caused you to encounter the problem,
2. the behavior you expected, and
3. the behavior you actually encountered (in as much detail as possible).
Thanks!

When reporting bugs in the future please use apport, either via the appropriate application's "Help -> Report a Problem" menu or using 'ubuntu-bug' and the name of the package affected. You can learn more about this functionality at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs.

[Vince McIntyre (vmcintyr)]

I don't understand why you think this is incomplete.

1. I already gave you this.
2. Let me spell it out for you:
    I opened the tool and expected to see four tabs, as is documented in the help pages for the tool.
3. Again, rehashing what I already told you:
    Instead, I see three tabs, 'General', 'DNS' and 'Hosts'. The 'Connections' tab noted in the manual is completely absent. I don't see what more detail I can provide.

I used ubuntu-bug to report this, that is where Dependencies.txt came from.
I don't have any control over how much information ubuntu-bug decides to put in the job.
I tried the 'report a bug' item in the help menu but that didn't appear to do anything, I'm guessing
this is because gnome-nettool doesn't have proper 'apport' support in it.

Perhaps you could tell me precisely what you think is missing instead of cutting&pasting the 'how to report text'.

[Vince McIntyre (vmcintyr)]

$ apt-show-versions gnome-nettool
gnome-nettool/lucid uptodate 2.30.0-0ubuntu1

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

Thanks for your report. This is not a bug but a design decision. NetworkManager is now the default in Lucid, and network-admin doesn't play well with it. NetworkManager provides everything you may find in network-admin, but less buggy, so please use that tool.

The connections tab has been removed to avoid misleading users, since configuring interfaces there would conflict with NetworkManager, and break your network in unexpected ways.

[Vince McIntyre (vmcintyr)]

Setting this to duplicate status is wrong.

I reported this bug because the documentation was at odds with what I saw in the tool.
So with the new information that the tool was changed on purpose (was this mentioned in the package README??),
this bug should be retitled - 'gnome-nettool: documentation describes a removed feature (connections tab)'.

Why is this package even in the release?
In the default list of packages that get installed with the desktop and are accessible from the desktop menu?
Thank you for wasting my time. Not.

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

OK, reopening then. But don't hope anybody will fix this. This package is not shipped in the default desktop, maybe it should have been removed on upgrade. Documentation is almost useless as it merely spells what is in the UI, and nobody will work on that since the tool is deprecated.

And please, you may think I'm wasting your time but you didn't pay me anything to use Ubuntu, and ATM you're rather wasting my (volunteer) time which could be spent in better issues like not installing that package at all.

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

By "docs", do you mean Ubuntu docs from System->Help and Support, or doc pages you get when clicking on the Help button from the network tool itself? See bug 575694 for the former case, which should be fixed with a higher priority than the latter.

[Vince McIntyre (vmcintyr)]

The comment about not installing the package at all is odd. I didn't manually select the package for installation.
As far as I can tell it's part of the default install. I installed the Ubuntu Studio flavour, so perhaps that's why it is still being installed. I've been dist-upgrading every few days and gnome-nettool is still there.

To clarify which documentation I was looking at - the help button from within network tool.

#575694 is referring to more or less the same issue but refers to the 'gnome-network-admin' package.
I am reporting an issue with 'gnome-nettool'. Strangely there is no Source: line in the package description
for this package, so I'm not sure if it belongs with gnome-system-tools, but perhaps it does.

$ apt-cache show gnome-nettool
Package: gnome-nettool
Priority: optional
Section: gnome
Installed-Size: 2820
Maintainer: Ubuntu Desktop Team <email address hidden>
Original-Maintainer: Debian GNOME Maintainers <email address hidden>
Architecture: i386
Version: 2.30.0-0ubuntu1
Replaces: gnome-network (<= 1.99.5)
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.7), libgconf2-4 (>= 2.27.0), libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.23.5), libg
tk2.0-0 (>= 2.14.0), libgtop2-7 (>= 2.20.0), liblaunchpad-integration1 (>= 0.1.1
7), libpango1.0-0 (>= 1.14.0), dnsutils, net-tools, iputils-ping | ping, iputils-tracepath, whois
Suggests: gnome-system-tools
Conflicts: gnome-network (<= 1.99.5)
Filename: pool/main/g/gnome-nettool/gnome-nettool_2.30.0-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
Size: 111392
MD5sum: fd807fc5b0250d260d46bc7572fed856
SHA1: 6b5cc1a5b66201039d600692849a4ef72352e186
SHA256: c8a54d3fde28dbafb830be619df156214e360be74a008fdf60900c46422c09d0

I don't particularly care if this is fixed.
I thought I might give back to Ubuntu by reporting that something seemed to be wrong.

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

Ah, if you're using Ubuntu Studio, then the package is indeed installed by default, which is a severe problem. See bug 570828.

gnome-nettool isn't the program you're thinking of, but rather a status applet. network-admin, from the gnome-system-tools source package, and the gnome-network-admin binary package, is at stake here.

[dino99 (9d9)]

This version is no longer supported; EOL reached since a while.