Dear Lukas and All, From my perspective, Netplan is a great add-on for homogenizing network management in the cloud, which requires simple to semi-complicated network needs, especially with heterogenous OS fleets. However, for many ways, Netplan is not a great default to begin with, since it’s both sitting on top of other stacks and has a slightly terse, YAML based configuration format which is great for auto-generation but slightly finicky for the newcomer.
You cite “average-user” use-case in your previous e-mail, but from my perspective, NetworkManager is a better tool for the average user, because its usage is homogenized across “system classes”. Applet for Desktops, TUI for the server newbies, nmcli/interacitve for experienced users and “nmcli” commands in scripts for the veterans. I personally think Netplan has a future in Debian, but it’s not the default installation. As I said, for the cloud images, it’s a good default, because cloud environments and Netplan aligns very well. But for other use cases, Netplan is just a daemon sitting dormant, an extra package which is brought in with default install. If the installer happens to write the Netplan config files during install, now there are two ways to wrangle the network in Debian. It’s either Netplan or the level below which can command the network hardware in a more direct manner. And, since Netplan needs to be translatable to both, Netplan can only handle the lowest common denominator of both, and may not be able to answer all needs of these users. Moreover, if a person is not aware that Debian now uses Netplan for network management, now the user experience is degraded because user will manipulate the underlying layer directly and will fight with Netplan in the process, which is bad PR for both Debian and Netplan. Moreover, most single servers are installed with interactive installer. I don’t think many people just deploy 200+ servers in one go with xCAT/Preseed or similar tools on bare metal in one go, but in either case, nobody touches networking files after a server settles. Again, in my experience, in datacenters like us, a server’s IP address or network configuration almost never changes even if it’s cattle[0]. The biggest change we made in the last decade was moving the same IP to another interface’s another VLAN. We don’t expect such a change in a decade, literally. I understand your enthusiasm for Netplan, however I don’t think that great tool’s place is default install, because while it might be small and well-packed, Netplan is certainly “Enterprise Software” in my eyes, filling the need for some specific yet limited cases, and does it very well. Lastly, you cite that Netplan stays dormant when it’s not configured, but NetworkManager does the same thing, too. If there’s a config for an interface in /etc/network/interfaces, NetworkManager just says “Oh, I’m not touching that!”. As a result, I fail to find a problem which can't be solved with non-abstracted stacks (NetworkManager, networkd), but can only be solved with Netplan. If anything else, again in my humble opinion, Debian can converge on NetworkManager, optionally with a file-generation layer like RedHat guys does, and recommend that in their docs, and point to Netplan for other cases where Netplan excels. I have no affiliation with any of the network stacks. I’m just a system administrator who happens to be in trenches, use this thing called Debian since 3.0 days, and want to chime in with my experience. Cheers, Hakan > On 5 Sep 2024, at 16:07, Lukas Märdian <sl...@debian.org> wrote: > > On 04.09.24 21:41, Daniel Baumann wrote: >> sorry, one more.. >> On 9/4/24 18:00, Lukas Märdian wrote: >>> But we ought to look at the bigger picture! >>> From that point of view, it doesn't make sense to even consider netplan. >> No distribution other than ubuntu is using it. >> If Debian uses network-manager and systemd-networkd, there's hardly any >> difference in the configuration wrt/ to the other major distributions, >> so, *that* has the potential to unify documentation. > > Except that others recommend only ONE tool and stick to it, while Debian > would recommend two at the same time. (Three actually, as Netplan is used > in our cloud-images.) > > That's exactly what leads to confusion. > > * Fedora/RHEL recommends NetworkManager > * Ubuntu recommends Netplan > * For others like Arch Linux or Gentoo, people choose their stack explicitly, > so it doesn't really matter. > > Debian would recommend NetworkManager for desktop/laptop, systemd-networkd > for server, Netplan for cloud. And people would need to do their research > to understand what stack they are on, to then better understand how to > control it. > >> or in other words: If you would truly care for that then let's use the >> chance to *remove* some Debian-isms (ifupdown and friends) from the "big >> picture", rather than further *adding* more divergence by fostering netplan. > > I'm all for removing Debian-isms, but I guess that's a discussion for another > year... > > Agreeing on Netplan would provide us with the hybrid stack that you described > above, but without the confusion. Furthermore, it's been proven in Ubuntu for > 7+ years, so lots of edge-cases have already been hit and handled. > > Cheers, > Lukas
