Proposal: enable stateless persistant network interface names

[Thomas Goirand]

On 06/26/2015 11:14 AM, Marco d'Itri wrote:
>>> I believe that firmware-based device names work well enough in practice 
>>> since RHEL 7 uses them by default: I tend to trust a market-based 
>>> approach to maintenability more than anecdote from a very selected 
>>> population like the debian-devel@ subscribers.
>> Oh, how nice is that... So our opinions don't count, and Red Hat is just
>> always right!
> Opinions do not make a statistic, indeed.

I'm sure you will agree that (computer) science is *not* about
statistics anyway. I also tend to feel uncomfortable when I read
"market-based" next to "[technical] approach", it's too marketing-ish,
and I like to think that marketing isn't what influences Debian's
technical decision (let's hope I'm not wrong here...).

> And you have not been paying attention, because right here I have 
> expressed many times disagreement with some Red Hat decisions.

Well, we don't have to follow all of what they do!

>> All from redhat. /me not surprised...
> Yes, at this point it is not a surprise that they produce good 
> documentation and we do not.

I was trying to make the point that all of this ifname renaming cruft
comes from Red Hat, and from systemd guys. Do we *have* to do it, just
because they do? I'm really not convinced, as I saw how much trouble it
can bring. For a single desktop machine, it's manageable. For a large
cloud deployment with (very) heterogeneous hardware and multiple ifaces
on each node, it can be hell to get the deployment right.

>> So your proposal is: if the default is unusable (like above), then the
>> poor user has to find a way to fix that... I'm not convince that this is
>> what we want. I'd very much prefer a usable default.
> Me too, but there is none that we can use.

Sure there is: keep the good old ethX naming, which has always worked
for many, many years. Now, expecting someone will raise the fact that
sometimes, we get a different order of the ifaces. Well, there's many
ways around that, the persistent naming file is one solution (which I
don't like, as I think it shouldn't be written by default, it should be
the user's decision to write it if he wants to, but hey, let's not
discuss that...).

Cheers,

Thomas