On Wed, 2015-05-27 at 20:50 +0100, Simon McVittie wrote: > I don't think ifupdown has been "Debian's native tool" for several years > now. It is one among several available tools, and happens to be the only > one with Debian as its upstream; on a wheezy-era sysvinit system that > uses NetworkManager perhaps on a desktop install... when you have e.g. your bootstrapped Debian you won't necessarily see NM at all. And I guess it's rather uncommon on Debian to use NM e.g. on server systems (probably also because most people wonder why they need a bloated daemon/etc. running just for a network that is brought up/down once every nnn days) Further: ifupdown has Priority: important and is Recommended by netbase while NM has just Priority: optional > the only thing ifupdown does for you is to bring up > lo, and on a systemd system even that is unnecessary. lo is probably that important that it's justified to bring it up by systemd... as said before, I haven't looked into the details of systemd-networkd,... so maybe I'd just love it,... but at least it smells like software bloat. Anyway, right now the situation is quite unfortunate... ifupdown is present on most (all?) and would probably work for many/most scenarios. NM is probably present on most desktop systems and kinda "required" by most desktopish/GNOMEish software... but it basically tries to replace (at least in terms of configuration) ifupdown/vpnc/etc. and not really cooperates with them. Sure there is the ifupdown plugin in NM, but that's basically broken and IIRC upstream even plans/wishes to remove it, actually I'd have loved the idea of such a plugin that properly takes up all the /e/n/interface + the ifupdown hooks and exports them via NM to GUI, but I guess that will never happen. So what we have is, a number of competing network config systems... - the native ones (vpnc, strongswan, ppp, iproute and so on) - some still quite low-level tools like ifupdown - higher level stuff like NM, which use some of the lower things and exports parts but not all of their functionality,... sometimes that works sometimes not (e.g. I have a bug in NM, that it repeatedly looses WPA-EAP connections,... while the same thing never appears with wpa +ifupdown). It would indeed be better, if (at the long term) there was rather just one such tool... or at least one that has an "official" default blessing and supports "all and everything". Cheers, Chris.
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