Re: Bug#824884: netbase: should not recommend ifupdown
Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@debian.org> writes:
> On Tue, May 24, 2016, at 13:03, Ansgar Burchardt wrote:
>> On Tue, 2016-05-24 at 11:43 -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
>> > On Tue, May 24, 2016, at 10:01, Simon McVittie wrote:
>> > > On Tue, 24 May 2016 at 09:08:11 -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh
>> > > wrote:
>> > > > Whatever we do, we absolutely must bring up a fully configured
>> > > > loopback
>> > > > interface by default.
>> > > Happily, our default init system already does that.
>> > We need to ensure any non-default ones also do that before we drop
>> > ifupdown from "recommends", because ifupdown + default
>> > /etc/network/interfaces is the fallback that ensures the loopback
>> > will be up.
>>
>> We are not talking about removing "ifupdown" from the default
>> installation which includes all "Priority: important" packages (which
>> happens to include both netbase and ifupdown).
>>
>> The only installations affected are debootstrap's "minbase" and
>> "buildd" variants: these only install "Priority: required" packages and
>> select extra packages (apt and, for buildd, build-essential). These
>> would no longer pull in "ifupdown" if "netbase" is installed.
>
> As far as I am concerned, ensuring the "master namespace" loopback is
> configured and up is actually required behavior and it should be
> enforced by something stronger than "priority important" packages being
> installed. Systemd got this right.
I note that systemd is one of those "priority important" packages ;) I
have to admit though that "init" is still[1] at "Priority: required" and
depends on the lower-priority "systemd" package (a policy violation that
makes life much easier and sane).
[1] <https://bugs.debian.org/824991>
> So, yes, I do think it would be best were it done by something in the
> initscripts package, since systemd is already doing it by itself as
> well.
That might be useful in either case to make sure "lo" gets setup
early. That would remove one subtle difference between systemd and
sysvinit.
> Also, it is "probably not ok" (as in I fully expect we will end up with
> people filling severity critical bugs should we do otherwise) to allow
> ifupdown (and likely netbase) to get uninstalled anywhere it was
> automatically installed, unless we ensure something else will take up
> their job. This is not even related to configuring the loopback, but
> rather to /etc/network/interfaces processing, as well as /etc/services.
I'm not sure why "netbase" should be uninstalled anywhere if we remove
the "Recommends: ifupdown" from "netbase"?
Also all "Priority: important" packages installed by the default
installation should be marked as manually installed as far as I
remember.
I guess if you use the "minbase" or "buildd" variants, install "netbase"
and "ifupdown" only as a recommended package, then apt might suggest to
remove the no-longer recommended package. I guess you mean this by
"automatically removed" even though it only happens by admin request as
far as I remember? If you include other reasons for "automatically
removed", like for example running dist-upgrade and not checking what
will be removed, there are many other packages that could be removed and
break networking/firewall hooks. (And "Recommends: ifupdown" will
likely not prevent that sort of removal for "ifupdown" anyway.)
Ansgar
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