[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#709953: network-manager: /etc/network/interfaces could not be parsed and gdm3 did not work after uninstall

[François Bienvenu]

Package: network-manager
Version: 0.9.4.0-10
Severity: critical
Justification: breaks unrelated software

I uninstalled network-manager from a fresh install of Wheezy
(with Gnome 3) to replace it with wicd.

The uninstall was done after I had taken care of the gnome
meta-package and stopped network-manager.

After this, I couldn't get wlan0 to work with wicd because it
was soft blocked. I didn't try anything else.

On next reboot I noticed that /etc/network/interfaces could
not be read. Then gdm3 froze.

I rebooted in rescued mode and fixed the interfaces file.
This fixed the "could not read /etc/network/interfaces"
message on starting, but gdm3 kept freezing.

gdm3 behaviour was quite erratic as sometimes it would
freeze a few seconds after the cursor had appeared (on a
black screen) sometimes it would display the usual screen.
Moreover, it rebooted after ~15 seconds due to "kernel panic",
but only twice (out of maybe 10-15 tries).

I tried purging and reinstalling gdm3, as well as every package
I thought could be involved. It didn't work.

Since removing network-manager was one of the only things I
had done to the system and since it had apparently cause some
trouble, I eventually reinstalled it. This immediately fixed
the problem.


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

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.UTF-8 (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                   1.16.10
ii  isc-dhcp-client        4.2.2.dfsg.1-5+deb70u3
ii  libc6                  2.13-38
ii  libdbus-1-3            1.6.8-1
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2       0.100.2-1
ii  libgcrypt11            1.5.0-5
ii  libglib2.0-0           2.33.12+really2.32.4-5
ii  libgnutls26            2.12.20-6
ii  libgudev-1.0-0         175-7.2
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            0.9.4.0-10
ii  libnm-util2            0.9.4.0-10
ii  libpolkit-gobject-1-0  0.105-3
ii  libuuid1               2.20.1-5.3
ii  lsb-base               4.1+Debian8
ii  udev                   175-7.2
ii  wpasupplicant          1.0-3+b2

Versions of packages network-manager recommends:
ii  crda          1.1.2-1
ii  dnsmasq-base  2.62-3+deb7u1
ii  iptables      1.4.14-3.1
ii  modemmanager  0.5.2.0-2
ii  policykit-1   0.105-3
ii  ppp           2.4.5-5.1+b1

Versions of packages network-manager suggests:
ii  avahi-autoipd  0.6.31-2

-- Configuration Files:
/etc/polkit-1/localauthority/10-vendor.d/org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pkla [Errno 13] Permission non accordée: u'/etc/polkit-1/localauthority/10-vendor.d/org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pkla'

-- no debconf information