Re: Community survey on network stack for Trixie

[James Lu]

On 2024-09-04 08:03, Lukas Märdian wrote:

Hi all!

On 04.09.24 15:46, Marc Haber wrote:

On Wed, 4 Sep 2024 11:27:45 +0200, Chris Hofstaedtler
<z...@debian.org> wrote:

* Marco d'Itri <m...@linux.it> [240903 14:04]:

My position is that I am happy for Debian to have the option of netplan

an abstraction which adds complexity and that nobody asked for other
than its developers.


for a modern system (I have been using it for close to 30 years and at
this point I think that it has served its purpose and there are better
defaults...).

but I do not think that it should be installed by default, because it is And this is an orthogonal issue with deciding if ifupdown is appropriate

I want to echo all of this. All my customers sites are currently
migrating away from ifupdown to networkd, and they don't need or
want an intermediate layer.

For the desktop(-like) systems, NetworkManager works nicely, again
without a need for an intermediate layer.

This, and this.

That said, I haven't used netplan very much so I have a few questions:

I agree with all of this. systemd-networkd and NetworkManager both feel like reasonable defaults depending on the install type.

That's exactly the point of Netplan. Try looking at the bigger picture:
Debian as a whole.

With Netplan we could provide coherent network configuration across all
variants of Debian (server, cloud, laptop, ...), while choosing the best
underlying stack for the usecase (i.e. systemd-networkd on server/cloud
and NetworkManager on desktop/laptop).

Yes, it's an additional abstraction layer, but it brings the big benefit
of coherence across Debian. Not confusing our users by having 4 different
ways to do network configuration.

IMO this assumes that netplan is the only network config tool an end user would end up interacting with. Is this really the case in practice? For example if I use the network tray applet in KDE Plasma, I'm fairly sure that talks to NetworkManager directly instead of going through netplan. Broadly, how does netplan deal with different frontends wanting the underlying tool to do different things?

In our documentation we could reference a single Netplan configuration,
that would get applied to both of the underlying stacks. As stated
previously, advanced users can easily configure the underlying stack
natively and Netplan will get out of their way.

Out of curiosity, what's the recommended workflow for doing this?

[1]: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1442352/
[2]: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1508124/

I'm not convinced switching network config tools is all that straightforward. While researching this topic, I read a couple of AskUbuntu posts[1][2] that definitely seem to suggest otherwise. (Perhaps part of the confusion is that netplan's config files are considered ephemeral to its backends, so that removing netplan can deconfigure the network even if its backends are still installed?)

Cheers,
   Lukas

Best,
James

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