Your open source civic duty (aka NetworkManager bug fixing)

I’ve been using NetworkManager and the VPNC plugin ever since Fedora Core 4. One thing that always irritated me about the VPN support though was that the applet’s list of VPN connections was displayed in ‘bogo sort’ order – aka not ordered in the slightest. I upgraded to Fedora Core 6 recently and found this still hadn’t changed and was about to submit a bug report when I wondered – “how hard can a fix really be?”. So I decided that rather than just enter another BZ ticket and wait for someone to have time to look at it, I should do my open source civic duty & write the patch myself. It turned out to be really quite trivial – all that was needed was changing a call to g_slist_append with a call to g_slist_insert_sorted. From itch, to patch in 30 minutes!

Update: I noticed the VPN configuration tool had the same sorting problem as the drop down menu of connections. So I knocked up an additional patch which registers a sorting function against the TreeModel for the VPN connection list. Finally, in testing this I discovered that if you rename a VPN connection, then the list entry with the old name is never removed. Which of course calls for a 3rd patch and another BZ entry. A busy evening!