Bug#704211: [release-notes] [wheezy] issues: NM conflicts with wicd-daemon, Gnome3 now depends on NM
Package: release-notes
Severity: important
--- Please enter the report below this line. ---
Greetings.
I'm looking to add information to the Release Notes and the Wheezy Errata in
order to handle bug #688772 concerning conflict between NetworkMmanager and
wicd-daemon. There are about 1800 known [1] installations in which NM is not
installed but the "gnome" metapackage is, and the upgrade to a Depends on NM
has a likelihood of breaking these installations, and at present there is no
documentation available for the symptoms or how to fix it. [I've been hit by
this conflict myself, so I know how frustrating a problem this is.]
Attached is a text file containing the basic information I'd like to add.
I've cloned the release-notes SVN repo for making a patch, but I'd appreciate
a hint as to what section to add it to or if there are wording changes
desired.
Thanks!
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=688772#151
-- Chris
--
Chris Knadle
Chris.Knadle@coredump.us
conflicts with other networking manager daemons
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Gnome upstream chose to couple NetworkManager tightly with the Gnome Shell
in order to provide connectivity awareness for both the Shell and Gnome3
applications. For this reason the Gnome3 maintainers in Debian decided to
follow upstream and upgrade the Recommends on the network-manager stack to a
Depends. It is known that a small number (about 5.7%) of Squeeze
installations have Gnome installed but not NetworkManager, and this
new Dependency will cause NetowrkManager to be installed upon a distribution
upgrade to Wheezy.
At present, NetworkManager can detect if an interface is managed by ifupdown
to avoid conflicts with it, but does not detect other networking manager
programs such as wicd-daemon. Problems and unexpected behavior can ensue if
two network manager daemons are managing the same interface when attempting
to make a networking connection. This issue was discussed by the Debian
Technical Committee in #681834 and #688772.
If wicd-daemon and NetworkManager are both running, a wicd client will fail
to make a connection with the counterintuitive message:
"Connection Failed: bad password"
Trying a NetworkManager client may sometimes result in the message (even when
NetworkManager is running):
"NetworkManager is not running. Please start it."
Or a NetworkManager client may work as expected. Or some other unexpected
behavior may occur.
If continuing to use another networking manager is desired, the NetworkManager
daemon may remain installed but be permanently disabled (which is persistant
through upgrades) with:
'update-rc.d network-manager disable'
You will also need to recreate /etc/resolv.conf, as the contents of this file
is replaced by NetworkManager.
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