Hi Martin, On Tue, Nov 11, 2025 at 01:55:18PM +0200, Martin-Éric Racine wrote: > > Moving to ifupdown-ng is the strategy that was agreed upon among the people > > doing the work. Please refer back to > > https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2024/07/msg00098.html#:~:text=ifupdown-ng > > for (some) reasoning and the DC25 Networking BoF for some more discussion > > https://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2025/DebConf25/debconf25-124-networking-bof.vp8.webm. > > The BoF wasn't accessible to many interested parties.
If you watch the BoF you'll find no formal decisions were made, but people got to discuss their high level concerns. We would have loved to hear your perspective but unfortunately you chose not to join the BoF remotely. Keep in mind that despite lack of DC video team coverage in our room Me and Lukkas scrambled to put together a video call and recording setup last minute amidst a packed conference schedule essentially just for you. You ended up choosing not to participate. > There was no agreement on the mailing list. Martin. Keep in mind Debian is a do-ocracy. I'm merely informing you the people doing (or having done) the doing are headed this way. If you disagree with this strategy you should feel free to do your own work and present it as an alternative. Given the growing (*cries*) number of items on my -ng compat TODO list it may yet be a while until we feel ready to make the change, but once we are ready we'll certainly send an announcment about it to d-devel before uploading to unstable given this is a major change. > > I'm not aware of any high-priority issues with bridge-utils. Could you be > > more specific? > > 1) It has widely different behaviors depending on whether the bridge > is started via allow-hotplug or via auto. Different how? What's the user impact? > 2) The aforementioned inconsistency with LL6 has long remained unsolved. I don't see how that could have any real world impact. Can you refer me to any reports demonstrating a problem other than aesthetics? > > What I don't see is why replacing bridge-utils (brctl) should be of such > > priority that we need to do it *right now* in ifupdown rather than just > > wait until it's replaced by -ng? > > 1) It was requested ages ago, back when it became clear that > bridge-utils was deprecated, and has remained unanswered since then. > Just look at the thread. > 2) We need something that works in a predictable and consitent way now. I have no particular interest in the bridging area at the moment as I've said. Despite this I'm giving you the opportunity to bring important issues to my attention here, but so far all I see is opinion and no technical substance. Bugx or it didn't happen as the kids like to say :D. > 3) ifupdown-ng has changed some of the configuration syntax, so it > cannot replace ifupdown. We've discussed this before and you neglected to point out any concrete way in which this is the case. I expect it actually fixes your issues with at most minor changes in the compatibility code. Have you considered trying ifupdown-ng and reporting bugs to demostrate your point? --Daniel
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