On Mon, Aug 01, 2016 at 04:43:27PM +0100, Simon McVittie wrote: > > Last time I looked at it, systemd-networkd required several > > configuration files just to bring up a single interface. > > What were the others, beyond the .network file? This is live configuration > from my home server, which has two network interfaces and I didn't want > it to bring up the other: > > # /etc/systemd/network/lan.network > [Match] > Path=pci-0000:03:00.0 > > [Network] > DHCP=yes
Ah. Either I didn't know that, or things have improved since last time I used it :) > > 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. > > This seems reasonable. I think NM is a better choice than ifupdown for > roaming client devices (e.g. laptops), and systemd-networkd is a good > choice for "infrastructure" devices like servers and NAS boxes. Although I personally use NM for my laptops, I know that there certainly are users who don't like it, and it is perfectly possible to configure wpa-supplicant and/or ifupdown to do whatever NM does. It's not even very difficult. > > How would it work on Hurd and kFreeBSD? > > That's up to the people who want to support those non-default kernels, > and I don't think it's reasonable to expect the rest of the distribution > to do that work for them. One possible answer would be to write or adapt > an ifupdown-like tool that works on those kernels and can consume (a > sufficiently large subset of) systemd-networkd .network (and maybe .link) > syntax, and/or NetworkManager /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/ > syntax. If that tool also worked on Linux, as a non-default option for > people who want a non-default init or just don't like the default > tools, so much the better. Well, that sounds like a bad idea to me. By the time you support all the features of networkd for example, you've just about ported networkd to that non-Linux platform. If you don't support all the features, having it look like a systemd.network file is just confusing to users. The time spent writing such a hypothetical tool would then be better spent keeping support for ifupdown in the installer for the non-Linux platforms. > I think this might be a good opportunity to get away from the anti-pattern > of defining a Debian-specific file format, which has a heavy risk of > <https://xkcd.com/927/>. Eh, that comic applies more to systemd than to ifupdown. Now might be a good time to look at distributions that have adopted networkd as the default way to configure interfaces, and see how they fare. -- Met vriendelijke groet / with kind regards, Guus Sliepen <g...@debian.org>
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