On Tue, 11 Jul 2023 at 17:48:40 +0200, Lukas Märdian wrote:
> From the discussions above, it seems that NetworkManager is relevant as well,
> though, and is being pulled in whenever a desktop task is installed (in
> addition to ifupdown or future systemd-networkd).
What happens at the moment is:
- if the tasks install NetworkManager, then d-i translates the install-time
networking into NetworkManager configuration, together with essentially
blank ifupdown configuration that makes ifupdown mostly a no-op (it
might still try to bring up `lo`, but systemd brings that up as an "API"
interface anyway, and probably so does NM if systemd didn't already)
- otherwise, d-i translates the install-time networking into ifupdown
configuration
Doing that, but with s/ifupdown/systemd-networkd/ throughout, makes
sense to me. Is that what others in this thread had in mind?
The practical result would be NM on desktop/laptop class systems, and
systemd-networkd on server/embedded systems, which as it happens is what
I'm already doing on my own machines.
> Therefore, I'd love to see Netplan to be used in combination with this!
> It's a clean, declarative configuration language not specifically tied to
> systemd-networkd as an implementation. So it could also be used on desktop
> installs where NetworkManager is important, for example to handle roaming
> between varying WiFi networks.
One of the major reasons why the desktop tasks use NetworkManager
is that it's well-integrated in desktop environments (particularly
our default GNOME desktop, but also others like KDE Plasma). If GNOME
controls NetworkManager directly, using its client library and D-Bus
API, is that going to conflict/collide with Netplan also trying to
control/configure NetworkManager? If I'm understanding Netplan correctly,
it treats NM and networkd configuration as essentially "write-only"
(like a compiler that inputs its own syntax and outputs NM or networkd
syntax), which doesn't seem compatible with GNOME going behind its back?
It seems unlikely that GNOME upstream is going to switch to using
a Netplan API and having it as a dependency unless it has extremely
compelling benefits, because they are happy with their design choice to
have tight integration with NetworkManager; and the Debian GNOME team
already does not have the resources to maintain GNOME in Debian as well
as we would like to, so I think I can safely say we aren't going to be
able to maintain a patch for GNOME to use Netplan APIs downstream. I'm
sure other major desktops like KDE Plasma are in the same situation.
smcv
