NetworkManager dependency

[Michael McConville]

Jorge Villaseñor wrote:
> Michael McConville wrote:
> > Ethan Blanton wrote:
> > > Gary Kramlich spake unto us the following wisdom:
> > > > Wait, are we actually talking about disabling by default instead of
> > > > updating to the newer version that'll make things better?
> > >
> > > I think they're two separate issues, actually.  But a newer version of
> > > NM won't really *fix* its crapitudity, it's rather endemic.  It will
> > > just take care of some specific complaints we have (the nature of
> > > which I don't recall at the moment).
> > >
> > > I am ambivalent on enable or disable by default; I simply said that it
> > > may be reasonable to disable by default.  Mike simply uses systems
> > > that don't work properly with a wide range of software (including NM),
> > > so he doesn't like it. ;-)
> >
> > True, to an extent.  :-)  NM does seem like an eminently optional add-on
> > feature, though. As far as I can tell, we only use it to get a hint of
> > whether the network is up.
> >
> > I'm also biased against NM in general, having fought its VPN-related
> > bugs in the past.
> >
> 
> I agree with explicit configuration so users know what they are building.
> 
> I would suggest we take our biases out and let the user or distributor
> decide what they want in their builds.
> 
> I don't recall which functionallity does NM provide to us, if it worth
> it or not, but I think that is a different discussion.

I didn't mean for that bias comment to be taken particularly seriously.
:-)

I think we all agree that the configuration should be explicit. It seems
like the discussion is just whether or not NM should be on by default.
What are your thoughts on that? I think it should probably be off by
default because it's only used for a minor supporting feature and it's
usually only available on one platform.