Paul Wise <p...@debian.org> writes: > On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 5:28 PM, Josselin Mouette wrote:
>> Alternatively, we could make NetworkManager the default. >> It is already here, it works, and it doesn’t have such problems. > Or systemd-networkd. systemd-networkd is not even close to mature yet. If someone wanted to work with the systemd project to cover all of Debian's requirements for a simple network management facility, I think that would be a very worthwhile thing to do. But there's a lot of work to do. NetworkManager is closer and *could* be made to handle everything that ifupdown does now, but it's substantially more complex than ifupdown, and speaking as someone who mostly runs servers, I would definitely object. ifupdown has a lot of problems, but most of those problems are around use cases more complex than bringing up a single interface with either DHCP or a static IP address, with no wireless involved. I realize that doing that well is not horribly challenging, but that is the most common server use case (and even desktop), and ifupdown does it quite well. I don't want to lose that, and I don't want to add a bunch of complexity in order to satisfy that case. I think there will always be a place for a very *simple* system to handle that case with some pre and post hooks for things like iptables rule installation. I think part of the problem with ifupdown is that it's trying to do too much. It's trying to handle all possible network configurations, and some of them (such as dynamic wireless with WPA and multiple known wireless networks) are *way* outside of its original design and data model. So it struggles. It's also not particularly adept with the new way that networks are modeled in the kernel. That doesn't make it a bad tool, but I think it means that we should provide more guidance about what things it does well and what things it does poorly. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/87eh1mrw4z....@windlord.stanford.edu