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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.)
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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...