Bug#681834: Call for votes on network-manager, gnome

[Chris Knadle <Chris.Knadle@coredump.us>]

On Tuesday, September 11, 2012 13:52:47, Jeremy Bicha wrote:
> I see two things missing from this resolution:
> 1. GNOME has a stronger dependency on NM than they did when Squeeze
> was released. GNOME Shell now has a hard dependency on NM.
> 
> > The user has to take separate, explicit (and somewhat unusual for the
> > average user) action to disable network-manager after it has been
> > installed.
> 
> 2. Yes, but it is also unusual for the average user to need to disable
> NM. For the average user, the consequences of not having NM are quite
> a bit worse than the benefits of being able to set up networking by
> hand. It's definitely possible to disable NM and the procedure to do
> this could easily be release-noted.

Comments on your two cents:

- There are other network managers than NM.

- I experienced breakages on NM on upgrades on several occasions, whereby
  I switched to wicd.

- My experience has been that NM conflicts with wicd when NM is running.

- Furthermore my experience has been that disabling NM via modifying the
  init script (i.e. the "exit 0" suggestion which came up on [debian-devel],
  or making the init script non-executble) only works until NM is upgraded,
  whereby the init script is replaced and thus the NM daemon starts again --
  which on Sid happens fairly regularly.

- Wishlist bug #685742 [1] suggested a way to disable NM permanently via a
  /etc/default/<package> file (like wicd comes with) but was outright
  rejected, in favor of instead using "update-rc.d network-manager disable"
  -- the latter of which isn't mentioned anywhere in the documentation that
  comes with NM.

- For these and several other reasons I'm personally in favor of Recommends
  rather than Depends for the NM package, as the tech-ctte has outlined.

[1]  http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=685742

  -- Chris

--
Chris Knadle
Chris.Knadle@coredump.us