Package: release-notes Severity: important --- Please enter the report below this line. ---
Greetings. I'm looking to add information to the Release Notes and the Wheezy Errata in order to handle bug #688772 concerning conflict between NetworkMmanager and wicd-daemon. There are about 1800 known [1] installations in which NM is not installed but the "gnome" metapackage is, and the upgrade to a Depends on NM has a likelihood of breaking these installations, and at present there is no documentation available for the symptoms or how to fix it. [I've been hit by this conflict myself, so I know how frustrating a problem this is.] Attached is a text file containing the basic information I'd like to add. I've cloned the release-notes SVN repo for making a patch, but I'd appreciate a hint as to what section to add it to or if there are wording changes desired. Thanks! [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=688772#151 -- Chris -- Chris Knadle chris.kna...@coredump.us
conflicts with other networking manager daemons ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Gnome upstream chose to couple NetworkManager tightly with the Gnome Shell in order to provide connectivity awareness for both the Shell and Gnome3 applications. For this reason the Gnome3 maintainers in Debian decided to follow upstream and upgrade the Recommends on the network-manager stack to a Depends. It is known that a small number (about 5.7%) of Squeeze installations have Gnome installed but not NetworkManager, and this new Dependency will cause NetowrkManager to be installed upon a distribution upgrade to Wheezy. At present, NetworkManager can detect if an interface is managed by ifupdown to avoid conflicts with it, but does not detect other networking manager programs such as wicd-daemon. Problems and unexpected behavior can ensue if two network manager daemons are managing the same interface when attempting to make a networking connection. This issue was discussed by the Debian Technical Committee in #681834 and #688772. If wicd-daemon and NetworkManager are both running, a wicd client will fail to make a connection with the counterintuitive message: "Connection Failed: bad password" Trying a NetworkManager client may sometimes result in the message (even when NetworkManager is running): "NetworkManager is not running. Please start it." Or a NetworkManager client may work as expected. Or some other unexpected behavior may occur. If continuing to use another networking manager is desired, the NetworkManager daemon may remain installed but be permanently disabled (which is persistant through upgrades) with: 'update-rc.d network-manager disable' You will also need to recreate /etc/resolv.conf, as the contents of this file is replaced by NetworkManager.
