Network Manager dependencies

[Tom H]

On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 4:13 PM, Clint Byrum <clint at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Excerpts from Tom H's message of 2012-08-22 00:24:11 -0700:
>>
>> IMO, we'll end up sooner or later using NM on X-less boxes by default
>
> I do not share your opinion. While I'm not ifupdown's biggest fan, it
> will likely be the network configuration tool of choice on servers for
> the forseeable future. NM is specifically targetted at the more flexible
> networking requirements of laptops and mobile systems. It does not,
> however, take into account all of the myriad use cases for servers that
> ifupdown handles.

Given the dislike/hate for that's often expressed on debian-devel,
Ubuntu'll have ifupdown and not have to worry about developing a
home-grown alternative to NM.

As an end-user I find the idea that every distribution has its own
networking configuration stack frustrating. In my day job, I work with
RHEL and Solaris. But I moonlight and have to deal with Arch, Debian,
Gentoo, Scientific (and Fedora), and Ubuntu. Arch and Gentoo are only
twice and once respectively - which makes things even worse.

Now that NM can handle bonds, bridges, and vlans, my hope's that
installing it on a X-less server'll be easy. Quite frankly, from an
efficiency perspective for Linux as a whole, it'd make more sense for
more developers to improve NM rather than work an alternatives. But
open source doesn't work this way.

Regarding the "flexible networking requirements", people make the same
argument for not switching to upstart or systemd..