On Mon, Aug 01, 2016 at 12:31:14PM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> We should also think hard about switching to a new default since
> currently many other major distributions are moving to NetworkManager
> and/or systemd-networkd (which nowadays is usable, works well for
> simpler use cases and will be installed on every Debian system anyway).
Last time I looked at it, systemd-networkd required several
configuration files just to bring up a single interface. I can't say it
was a very user-friendly experience. But perhaps things are better now?
I'd say a good starting point would be to try to switch the installer to
configuring NetworkManager or systemd-networkd, instead of generating a
/etc/network/interfaces file. Once there is such a pre-generated
configuration, a barrier has already been overcome; it's easier to tweak
something that's already there than to write it from scratch.
How would it work on Hurd and kFreeBSD?
Ideally, it would be nice to have something like "ifconfig-persistent",
equivalent to netfilter-persistent but remembering and restoring
interface configuration. It's quite a hard problem though; statically
configured interfaces are easy, but for dynamically configured ones
you'd have to track down which daemons are managing which interfaces
(dhclient, wpa-supplicant, network-manager etc.) and have do the right
thing to restart them at boot when necessary. Instead of managing this
problem itself, it could just create systemd-networkd or NetworkManager
configuration at shutdown time. The advantage would be that the user
doesn't need to know what the configuration paradigm du jour is, and can
just configure things once in whatever way they like, and be sure that
their settings are not lost on reboot.
--
Met vriendelijke groet / with kind regards,
Guus Sliepen <guus@debian.org>
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