[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#697040: network-manager: Connections bounce down-up when restarting NM during upgrade

[Phil Miller]

Package: network-manager
Version: 0.9.4.0-7
Severity: normal

During the upgrade of various packages, including NM from 0.9.4.0-6 to
0.9.4.0-7, I noticed that the package configuration actually takes down all of
the NM-managed interfaces while NM restarts:

Setting up network-manager (0.9.4.0-7) ...
[ ok ] Reloading system message bus config...done.
[ ok ] Stopping network connection manager: NetworkManager.
# NM-managed network interfaces are down here
[ ok ] Starting network connection manager: NetworkManager.

This was mildly annoying to have various persistent connections drop when
applications saw that the network was down, but could have been much worse if
there were more important network-dependent activities occuring during the
upgrade. Is it necessary for NM to actually shut down interfaces when it stops,
or does NM coming up require all managed interfaces to be/go down? This seems
to be somewhat capricious, versus leaving interfaces in their fully configured
state, and allowing the new instance to observe conditions at startup and
sustain them.



-- System Information:
Debian Release: 7.0
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages network-manager depends on:
ii  adduser                3.113+nmu3
ii  dbus                   1.6.8-1
ii  dpkg                   1.16.9
ii  isc-dhcp-client        4.2.4-4
ii  libc6                  2.13-38
ii  libdbus-1-3            1.6.8-1
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2       0.100-1
ii  libgcrypt11            1.5.0-3
ii  libglib2.0-0           2.33.12+really2.32.4-3
ii  libgnutls26            2.12.20-2
ii  libgudev-1.0-0         175-7.1
ii  libnl-3-200            3.2.7-4
ii  libnl-genl-3-200       3.2.7-4
ii  libnl-route-3-200      3.2.7-4
ii  libnm-glib4            0.9.4.0-7
ii  libnm-util2            0.9.4.0-7
ii  libpolkit-gobject-1-0  0.105-3
ii  libuuid1               2.20.1-5.3
ii  lsb-base               4.1+Debian9
ii  udev                   175-7.1
ii  wpasupplicant          1.0-3+b2

Versions of packages network-manager recommends:
ii  crda          1.1.2-1
pn  dnsmasq-base  <none>
ii  iptables      1.4.16.3-4
pn  modemmanager  <none>
ii  policykit-1   0.105-3
pn  ppp           <none>

Versions of packages network-manager suggests:
pn  avahi-autoipd  <none>

-- no debconf information