On Tue, 9 Jul 2024 at 14:44, Simon Richter <s...@debian.org> wrote: > > Hi, > > On 7/9/24 17:57, Matthias Urlichs wrote: > > >> Agreed: either it's drop-in compatible or we may as well switch the > >> default to NM and/or systemd-networkd. > > > Well, here's a heretical thought: why don't we do that anyway, at least > > for new installations? > > Both are overly complex for a static-IP-only server installation, where > there is no requirement for an unprivileged user to modify the network > configuration, or any background process at all, really. At least in > expert mode I would expect a way to generate a static, > unmanaged-by-anything configuration.
As per smcv's point, if you need to manually write a static configuration then you can also install your favourite tool to use it. This is not the default case - the default case is "I have ethernet and/or wifi and I want DHCP v4+v6 on anything that can talk to a router kkthxbye" > What would be needed for new installations is d-i support, mainly, and > the difficulty there is saving the configuration. > > I believe NM does not have a fixed configuration format, but only a dbus > API. Our best bet there would be a firstboot unit, but I have no idea > whether accessing NM from a unit attached to firstboot is safe or leads > to a dependency loop[1]. > > I'm not sure if systemd-networkd is much happier long-term if we write > its configuration from a shell script, we'd need to get some commitment > from upstream that this is an interface, not an implementation detail, > at least. I'm not sure what this means, you can write networkd configuration files from wherever you like, the tool doesn't care, it wouldn't even be able to tell the difference anyway, just drop them in the appropriate location in /etc/ and off you go.
