(This shouldn't have to be said, but please don't CC me on list messages unless you both specifically want to draw my attention to them and think I might not read them on-list otherwise. I am clearly subscribed to the mailing list.)
On 2019-06-26 at 14:49, Michael Stone wrote: > On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 07:51:53PM -0400, The Wanderer wrote: > >> On 2019-06-25 at 09:28, Michael Stone wrote: >>> They're perfectly predictable for a given system. >> >> And reasonably unpredictable between systems. > > When dealing with other people's systems, there was always an > element of randomness. I've run into it so often that it's just hard > to understand why that's even debatable but I suppose people have > differing experiences. If you're absolutely convinced that the world > can't work if the first ethernet interface in a system isn't named > eth0, just stop reading here because it won't get any better. That's such an excessive exaggeration of my position that I have a hard time taking your associated arguments seriously. >>> The old names also weren't constant, but people didn't seem to >>> care as much about the nuances because "that's the way it's >>> always been". (Sometimes it was an eth, sometimes it was a wlan, >>> etc.) Why were those differences ok but these differences >>> aren't? Familiarity. >> >> No, not just familiarity. >> >> To the best of my awareness, the old names were 100% constant, as >> long as you had no more than one interface *of a given type*. > > And never changed anything, because locking the names via udev was > necessary to keep them from renaming themselves. So if you bought a > new nic it would never, ever show up as eth0 without some edits. Which isn't possible anyway if the network device is hardwired into the motherboard, as is the case on every consumer-targeted system I remember encountering for as long as I've been paying conscious attention. While I do know where to find add-in network cards if I need or want them, I don't know if I'd even be able to find a motherboard without integrated networking, at least on the desktop side. (And if you're doing expansion-card replacement on laptops, except maybe something like replacing one wireless card with another, you're better than I am. I'm not sure I've ever even seen a laptop with a *free* expansion slot.) >> With the new names, the fact that two interfaces get different name >> prefixes (etc.) tells you basically nothing useful about how to >> handle them; it just exposes underlying hardware details of some >> kind, which you don't actually need to know in order to make >> effective use of those interfaces. > > The en, wl, ww, etc, prefixes tell you the exact same information > (what the class of interface is). I guessed there might be something like that, but couldn't remember with confidence. > The remaining information also relates useful information as to how > the interface is attached. You might personally not care about that > information, but it seems presumptuous to decide that nobody should. That information can be useful in some contexts, and I'm certainly not saying that it should not be available to people who do care about it. But as far as I can discern, it does not tell you anything about how you(r software) needs to handle the interface, whereas wired vs. wireless does - and the overwhelming majority of potential end users do not care about anything it does tell you. If you know of any cases/examples where the exact path by which a network device is connected to the system makes a difference to how the system's software needs to handle it, please do explain it, and what the different handling involved is; I haven't been able to think of any such. >>> That does change the name, that's the entire point. >> >> With no real benefit as far as I can tell, but yes. > > Since I've already explained how that's helpful, I assume this is > intentional? I understand that you refuse to believe that having > more than one NIC is a thing. Of course it's possible to have more than one NIC. That's why having the new naming pattern available as an option is a good thing. It's just not remotely the common case, so it shouldn't be the default; people who need it will have an easy enough time of turning it on, but people who don't need it are much less likely to have enough skill etc. to turn it off. (And if they don't turn it off, it's that much harder for skilled people to advise them on how to do things.) >>> They're also the only computers where the name actually matters. >>> In the simple case it's set at install time and doesn't change, >>> so it could be completely random and it wouldn't make a >>> difference. >> >> It matters if you're giving someone directions, with the computer >> sight unseen. >> >> Before, you could write directions - or even a script - which just >> referenced 'eth0' and/or 'wlan0', and hand the result out >> Internet-wide, with assurance that it would work reliably for the >> large majority of people. >> >> Now, you have to do something to detect the interface(s) and >> choose the right one. > > So your entire issue boils down to not wanting to explain a few > fundamental concepts and instead take some shortcuts which would > *never* have worked reliably in all cases? I'd rather just show > people how to find out which interfaces they have and cover all the > cases without all the drama. In about the same terms as your entire issue boils down to not wanting to accept that your environments are in the minority and insisting that the defaults should reflect your special case. No, that's not a particularly fair way to express it, but neither was yours a particularly fair way of describing my position. Explaining the same few fundamental concepts *over and over*, to *everyone* you're trying to help (some of whom you may have never encountered before, and may never encounter again), is an unwieldy and daunting prospect, the more so when the entire thing is so unnecessary. >>> If there's more than one result, it was going to be hard "the old >>> way" also. More portably, something like >> >> Why? >> >> Just using 'eth0' blindly wasn't hard at all, and since we're >> dealing with single-user workstations which will never have more >> than one wired and one wireless interface, it was a safe >> assumption to rely on. > > I never found it all that unusual to see more than one interface on > a single user workstation. For all kinds of reasons like, "it came > with two ethernet ports" Was this ever common on consumer systems (the sort which become desktops)? I don't remember seeing it in more than a tiny fraction. > or "the builtin one was a realtek and I wanted it to have an > intel"or "it came with 100Mbps onboard and it needed gigabit (adjust > to 1 and 10gbps for newer sytems)" or "the onboard one flaked out so > I added this other thing". All of those are, in fact, unusual cases. The large majority of end users do not have enough technical savvy to swap in an expansion card. > At this point it seems like you think that *your specific > environment* is the only one that matters, even though other people > are trying to make a distribution that reliably addresses a lot of > different use cases. You're likely to continue to be disappointed > that things are not optimized for your personal requirements. I gave my environment as one example, and have been responding based on it because it's what I know best. (It's not even based on Debian, although it is based on a distro which has adopted the new naming pattern.) Yes, of course addressing a lot of use cases is a worthwhile goal, and I'm not trying to argue against or detract from that. It's just that it makes more sense to optimize the default for the most common case, especially when the less common cases all correspond to more likelihood of being able to change away from the default. All of which is actually afield from my original point in replying to this thread, which is that it's not really appropriate to call either type of configuration "predictable", because they're equally unpredictable in different circumstances. (With the implication that it's unfortunate at best that the people responsible for the new name pattern decided to call it that anyway.) Most of the other commentary about the subject, in my initial reply, was intended as explanatory context for that point. I should arguably have left out the remainder, regardless of how strongly I may feel about some of it, but I didn't realize at the time that it would prove to be so much of a distraction. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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