On Mon, 19 Jun 2023 at 14:13:11 +0200, Ansgar wrote:
> On Mon, 2023-06-19 at 13:35 +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
> > Why does isc-dhcp-client have priority:important to begin with?
> > I don't think users care so much about a dhcp client but rather a
> > network configuration system
>
> The priority question isn't the important one. The real question is:
>
> What network configuration system should users end up with (by
> default)?
Yes, whatever DHCP client ifupdown would prefer to use, that seems
like an implementation detail of ifupdown: it should pull it in via
an appropriate level of dependency, and that's orthogonal to whether a
particular class of installation has its networking managed by ifupdown,
NetworkManager, systemd-networkd or something else by default.
At the moment I believe the status quo for d-i is that networking is
managed by NetworkManager if a desktop task happens to have pulled it in,
or ifupdown otherwise? And that seems reasonable (although I personally
prefer to set up systemd-networkd on servers).
Of our desktop tasks, all except possibly LXDE and LXQT pull in
NetworkManager via Recommends or stronger, which seems right. LXDE
and LXQT might pull in connman as a higher preference than NM, via an
alternative dependency that includes connman-gtk or cmst: it's not
immediately obvious to me what actually happens, and I don't have a
recent installation of either one to look at right now.
The other possible reason to have a DHCP client is for recovery, but
most bootable Debian systems will have busybox (via Recommends from
initramfs-tools-core), and that has a small DHCP client included anyway.
> I also think that installing both ifupdown and NetworkManager on
> desktop environments is worse than only NM.
ifupdown should be fairly harmless when not configured to manage any
non-loopback interfaces (which is what d-i does when NM is installed),
but I agree that it seems better not to have it if it's not needed.
smcv
