Proposed F19 Feature: systemd/udev Predictable Network Interface Names

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2013-01-24 at 14:57 -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Matthew Miller (mattdm at fedoraproject.org) said: 
> > > But I guess we simply have a different definition of a user here. Your
> > > definition is probably closer to what the page calls "admins", which is
> > > covered by the next lines in the feature page, which you didn't paste:
> > 
> > Right. For Fedora, developers and admins are an important subset of users.
> > 
> > > "As biosdevname is installed by default ...  most administrators won't
> > > see this either. "
> > 
> > If the new scheme really is better, we should suck it up and make the whole
> > change. It'd be better to do what we can to make that transition easier --
> > like using similar names were possible -- than to have a weird mixed state.
> 
> So, thinking - if we were to go this route, I think we'd want a clean
> break, where we don't use biosdevname at all if we're using this.

I am +1 to this in theory, but as Kay notes, it rather makes this a more
prominent feature in practice. We've gone from 'effectively non-default
brand new persistent naming scheme' to 'brand-new persistent naming
scheme completely replacing all previous ones'. Which gives me something
of a fit of wibbles.

Is it worth at this point stepping back and asking whether this change
is still appropriate for F19 as-is, or whether we should view the *final
goal* as being to migrate wholesale to the new udev/systemd way of doing
it, but maybe think about getting there in stages? This may wind up
right back at the original proposal where we include the new method but
don't make it the default for F19, but with a different outlook: the
intent being to make it default for F20. At least we could try and get
people to take a look at it first, that way. This code seems pretty new,
and just dumping it straight in as default seems to risk going through
exactly the same process biosdevname did.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
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