On Wed, 06 Apr 2011 07:29:05 +0200, Josselin Mouette <j...@debian.org> wrote: > ... and since it’s not event-based you have to hard-code the way your > network is set up.
I think this is the vital difference -- those that prefer ifupdown do so because they prefer to be in tight control of what is happening on their systems, whereas those that prefer NM don't want to be bothered about networking, they just want things to work. When someone wanders into an Internet cafe and plugs a wire into their Ethernet port, they just want a notification to tell them that they're online. If some dimwit sysadmin at my co-lo plugs something new into my server I want _absolutely_ _nothing_ to occur, not even a new process -- a syslog message would be fine. I don't want to have to learn a lot of complicated tricks to turn all the cleverness in NM off to achieve this, because an upgrade is bound to introduce new cleverness that I'll then need to learn to turn off, and each repeat of that is going to be a painful discovery. I also don't want a lot of code I don't routinely use sitting on my disks waiting for someone to discover an exploit. So, clearly one size is never going to fit all. We then seem to have a choice of installing something that works well for one group, and giving the others the chance to add the other (say, by including NM in the desktop task), or installing the other and getting the people who want less to remove it -- given that we've already implemented the first, and it seems to work fine, why would we want to force server installs of Debian (which may well be in the majority) to uselessly default to installing software that will either do a poor job for the life of the server, or incur the additional effort of removing it? On the other hand, if NM based udeb can do a better job of guessing what's going on from within D-I, and can be preseeded to not bother probing for things that are inappropriate, and can be persuaded to configure ifupdown for the server scenario (with no need to put N-M, dbus, etc onto the target) then fine, let's use it in D-I. Cheers, Phil. -- |)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] http://www.hands.com/ |-| HANDS.COM Ltd. http://www.uk.debian.org/ |(| 10 Onslow Gardens, South Woodford, London E18 1NE ENGLAND
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