The first time I rebooted after iproute2 removed the /sbin/ip link, my system
failed to boot. I eventually discovered this was because /sbin/vconfig (from
the "vlan" package) calls /sbin/ip and when that failed the network was not
configured. This meant having to boot into single user mode for diagnostics
because systemd hung forever waiting for the network.
This change was noted in NEWS.
I would suggest hooking your config into something that uses the
network-online.target target, with a timeout like network-manager and
networkd do, so that the boot process doesn't hang. If it's a simple
unit, it's enough to add RuntimeMaxSec= to it, so that it's killed if
it doesn't work within the configured timeout.
It's just so depressing that this is how debian works now. We used to
try to not break things, now the answer is "you should have read the
NEWS, and known that unrelated packages were going to break, and
reconfigured standard debian network tools to add non-default
timeouts". All because the aesthetic preference for not having the same
binary appear in two different paths is a higher priority than
keeping systems working.
