[p_l]

It took about a decade for NetworkManager to gain CLI, all the time it tried to eat more and more control over network stack. It was also opinionated in the worst possible way, like responding to requests to support ad-hoc wifi mode (back when NM was only about WiFi) with "your request is dumb, you're dumb, and we will never do that".

It got usable within last few years as somewhat general thing (after having already wrestled control over network from you first), of course by the time it got useful work started on replacing it with new thing.

[circularfoyers]

Not saying I don't believe you, but do you have a citation for when they responded to requests in that way?

[p_l]

Wish that 2005-me was interested in keeping the citation, but I strongly remember it because I was dealing with first WiFi-enabled device at home at the time - and ad-hoc was the only form of network connectivity for me for a long time.

At the time, NetworkManager was gaining steam as "the" solution to wifi woes, and well, I tasted dirt ;)

[jamesgeck0]

NetworkManager was literally just a GUI initially, wasn't it? IIRC in 2006, connecting to wifi from the CLI on a system with NetworkManager involved running the wpa_supplicant commands that NetworkManager wrapped.

[p_l]

It already had beginnings of current architecture, but at the time it only wrapped iwconfig and wpa_supplicant, yes.

But the decision to leave people who asked for ad-hoc support (especially when, outside of USA and possibly few other countries, access points were still not as common equipment) was done by design, not because it would require any significant increase in code (IMO).