It seems to me this proposal is just a *tad* too ambitious. I haven't followed the entirety of all threads about this topic (has anyone?) but it seems to me we're proposing to do two major changes at once:
1. replace ifupdown with systemd-networkd
2. unify configuration of networkd and NetworkManager with netplan
*Either* of those seems somewhat controversial to me, and after reading
a few messages in this thread, seems that neither has reached consensus.
For example, in my personal opinion, even if netplan could work with an
ifupdown backend (and it can't!) I wouldn't support #2 here. I don't see
why I would need a unified configuration layer between ifupdown (or
systemd-networkd) and NM, it basically never has been a use case for
me. I either configure servers (in which case i use ifupdown or
networkd) or desktops (in which case I use NM).
And then, of course, there's the "systemd question". I've been slowly
converting my personal servers over to systemd-networkd, because I've
been having similar issues than DSA with IPv6 contention issues.
It generally works! And, yeah, it's a couple of config files to
manage, but it's nothing that puppet (or ansible) can't easily handle,
so that's not a problem for me at all.
Yet, that change is a big deal in Debian. ifupdown is one of those
Debian-specific things that has been around since basically
forever. It's in numerous guides and manuals, so lots of documentation
would need to be updated to reflect such a huge change. And that's not
counting all the people who have expressed here and elsewhere that they
just don't *want* to change away from ifupdown.
I happen to think it's the right way to go, personally, but I think the
way to do this would be to first add support for systemd-networkd in d-i
and cloud images, rather than netplan, because that would be far less
controversial. It would still allow people who want to to stick to
ifupdown, for example, it would "just" change defaults.
Either way, coming from the bits from the DPL here, I was hoping to see
a unified proposal that would try to approach consensus, but I don't
feel this is it. netplan is yet another controversial idea, and I don't
think it's consensual.
I would focus on trying to reach consensus to replace ifupdown with
networkd in d-i/images first, in any case. If we *must* use netplan to
do this, as an implementation, then okay, so be it. But just deciding
this is a huge step, and we should focus on that, if that's the
direction we want to go.
Just a thought.
--
Computer science is no more about computers
than astronomy is about telescopes
- E. Dijkstra
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