Hi,
The move from wicked to NetworkManager as default for everything during
the last months revealed some (welcomed) side effects: since several
weeks sysconfig-netconfig is no longer installed on a fresh default
installation.
Why is this welcomed and good? netconfig is a nice abstraction layer for
network stack configuration, you don't need to care which network stack
get's used, the config is always the same.
But this is also the problem: by supporting several kinds of network
stacks, you can mostly only support the lowest common denominator and
not all features of a stack are useable.
And this means:
- we have to maintain code where we don't need the main functionality
anymore
- users are by default restricted in the use of NetworkManager
- packagers have to write and maintain additional scripts for
netconfig instead of using the upstream ones for NetworkManager
But we have only NetworkManager left.
As a result we took a deeper look at which packages are still using
/etc/sysconfig/network. To be said, the absolute majority of the scripts
I looked at are broken and don't work anymore, partly since about 10
years. And nobody noticed...
While there are no plans to active drop sysconfig-netconfig and wicked,
it also does not make sense to maitain scripts not used anymore or
broken since a long time while limiting ourself for every installation.
So going forward, please us the native NetworkManager APIs for your
packages.
The /etc/sysconfig/network hierachie get's removed from filesystem.rpm,
so that people don't see them and assume they are used by default. You
can of course still install sysconfig-netconfig (which will create the
directories) and use them.
For some netconfig functionality, we have packages which provide the
functionality native with NetworkManager:
GNOME:Next/NetworkManager-dns-bind
GNOME:Next/NetworkManager-dns-dnsmasq
Testers and feedback to the maintainer are always welcome.
There are no plans to automatically migrate from wicked and
sysconfig-netconfig to plain NetworkManager. Since some tools write
their configuration data to different locations depending on the network
stack (like firewalld), an automatic conversation would be pretty complex
next to impossible.
And there are currently no plans to drop this tools. But long term, you
should migrate to NetworkManager if you haven't done yet.
Between, there are still packages requiring sysconfig.rpm. There seems
to be a common misunderstanding: sysconfig.rpm is not used for
/etc/sysconfig config files, even if the name may implies this.
Currently, only wicked and YaST2 uses this package. Where I'm not sure
if YaST is really using it or if this is an old, obsolete or wrong requires.
Thorsten
--
Thorsten Kukuk, Distinguished Engineer, Senior Architect, Future Technologies
SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH, Frankenstraße 146, 90461 Nuernberg, Germany
Managing Director: Ivo Totev, Andrew Myers, Andrew McDonald, Martje Boudien Moerman
(HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg)