Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 3121
chat-to-dip is a mess
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:50 EDT
When working with slip, netcfg creates a chat script, but then translates it into a dip script. But the translation is trivial, and completely unusable for non-trivial applications. For example, what I _need_ is a dip sequence: sleep 2 send & sleep 1 send & sleep 1 send & I could, in theory, create this effect in chat with "\d\d&\d&\d&", but netcfg translates that to send \d\d&\d&\d& which is of no use at all. Between this, and the fact that linuxconf doesn't do the chat-to-dip translation in the first place, it took me days to get a connection to my IPS (IBM Global Network), and I had to do it by a completely bass-ackwards reverse-engineering attempt. linuxconf, netcfg and usernet should all work together, and either usernet should do slip with chat or linuxconf and netcfg should allow the user to create a dip script in the first place. Or just replace all this hoo-hah with instructions in the install manual on how to use chat or dip directly. Right now, I feel like the kid in the poster with spaghetti dumped all over him. (For what it's worth, I'm a professional programmer with 34 years of experience, including about 2 years on IRIX. But I'm new to Linux, and I've never done slip or ppp before without ISP-provided dialer software.)
This issue has been assigned to a developer for further action.
The translation works for most folks, and so the answer is to modify the dip script by hand if the generated script does not work. We'll never make a graphical interface that maps the full power of dip's scripting language into a graphical format, so no matter what small improvements we make, each improvement will only help a few users and leave us with a still-imperfect solution for a technology that is now almost unused, in comparison with PPP. The other possibility is to try to hook up chat and slattach, but at least the last time I looked, one or the other or both would require changes to do that, and probably even more people would complain if we did that...