wired ethernet disabled between reboots, was: when startup delays become bugs

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2013-05-21 at 14:02 -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:

> 1. Connect Automatically may work as designed, but it's a flawed
> design. It makes no sense to have an admin user enable a network
> through the Gnome shell toolbar icon (Network icon, flip the switch
> from Off to On), reboot, and then have no network. The widespread
> convention for all other such UI switches is that they're sticky. I
> don't have to go make them behave sticky by checking something five
> layers deep. Something I wouldn't have even considered exists as it's
> apparently unique, I've never encountered an automaticity option on
> Windows or OS X. It's a bizarre convention. Off means off, make that
> sticky through reboots. On means on, make that sticky through reboots.

The question of whether it should be *system wide* is a different
question from whether it should *persist*.

It does seem to me that the setting a user chooses for a wired
connection should persist across boots for that user; this is what NM
does for wireless connections, after all. That much seems like a
straightforward NM bug, but I may be missing something.

Making settings system-wide is a more complex issue, and more subjective
as to whether it should happen automatically when set by an admin user
(as you suggest) or not. GNOME could really do with a push in this area;
there is something of a convention for how to allow a user to 'push' a
setting to be system-wide, but it's nowhere near universally implemented
for relevant settings yet.

> 3. The naming convention of the interfaces is confusing. Sometimes
> it's ifcfg-en5s0 and sometimes ifcfg-p5p1 for the same interface and I
> don't know why. 

That's nothing to do with NM, it's the 'persistent device naming' stuff
at a lower level. Up to F18 this was being done by biosdevname, which
gave the 'p5p1' naming; in F19 it's being done by systemd, which gives
the 'en5s0' naming. There was an effort to ensure they at least both
called the most common case 'em1', but beyond that, they have different
naming schemes. Life's fun, huh. This kinda sucks, but it's not NM's
fault. There was discussion of the issue on this list earlier in the f19
cycle.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
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