[Pkg-lxde-maintainers] Bug#988696: connman does not respect /etc/network/interfaces when upgrading from buster to bullseye and more general considerations

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

I'd like to draw the attention of debian-devel to the problem below
(reported ad bug #994875) which breaks certain systems on upgrades.

As I described in bug #988696 which boils down to my last message to
this bug report where I wrote "No idea how to configure network easily
after fresh lxde install."  This means:  Even an experienced user like
me does not obviously find easy access to a very important feature of a
fresh installation to login to a network.

My reason to bring this up on debian devel is that I have the feeling
that while we provide lots of different desktops in dedicated images the
general QA how useful these might be is left to the maintainers of this
desktop who probably have a focussed view and do not realise what
hurdles newcomers might need to take.

My other point is that we here have another case where the freedom of
choice of tools to use leads to non-default behaviour.  I simply assumed
that network-manager would be some kind of default and if it would be
used in lxde task those two problems would not have happened.  So my
suggestion is to propose some set of default tools for every desktop
environment we are providing and network configuration should be part of
it.  (I admit I also had trouble with wicd which until some point of
time was installed as default with xfce4 installer media - no idea
whether this is the case any more - my arguing would be the same here.)

Kind regards

     Andreas.

PS: I also CCed debian-desktop list.  If you feel the discussion
    should happen there please CC me since I'm not subscribed to
    that list.

On Wed, Sep 22, 2021 at 01:09:17PM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> Package: connman
> Version: 1.36-2.2
> Severity: important
> 
> Hi,
> 
> recently I was upgrading a workstation running buster to bullseye from
> remote.  This box had a fixed IP set in /etc/network/interfaces.  After
> a rebooting I've "lost" the machine and I had to check the machine
> physicaly.  It was asking for a totally different IP address via DHCP.
> I found out that connman was installed on this machine due to lxde
> metapackage Recommends.  After simply purging connman which is not used
> anyway all went fine on this machine.
> 
> I would have loved to track this down in more detail but this
> workstation is mission critical and there is no option to bother users
> with fiddling around on the system that is now running as expected
> again.  I'm fine with digging in the logs if you tell me what kind of
> information is needed.
> 
> Kind regards
>     Andreas.
> 
> 
> -- System Information:
> Debian Release: 11.0
>   APT prefers testing
>   APT policy: (501, 'testing'), (50, 'buildd-unstable'), (50, 'unstable'), (5, 'experimental'), (1, 'buildd-experimental')
> Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
> 
> Kernel: Linux 5.10.0-8-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU threads)
> Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=de_DE:de
> Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
> Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
> LSM: AppArmor: enabled
> 
> Versions of packages connman depends on:
> ii  dbus                 1.12.20-2
> ii  init-system-helpers  1.60
> ii  iptables             1.8.7-1
> ii  libc6                2.31-13
> ii  libdbus-1-3          1.12.20-2
> ii  libglib2.0-0         2.68.4-1
> ii  libgnutls30          3.7.1-5
> ii  libreadline8         8.1-1
> ii  libxtables12         1.8.7-1
> ii  lsb-base             11.1.0
> 
> Versions of packages connman recommends:
> pn  bluez          <none>
> pn  ofono          <none>
> ii  wpasupplicant  2:2.9.0-21
> 
> Versions of packages connman suggests:
> pn  connman-vpn  <none>
> 
> 

-- 
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