Comment 7 for bug 1704376

My first point was that a bare line in interfaces.d/eth0.cfg without it having an associated stanza is improper configuration.
A "pre-up" line is done in association with a device. (When bringing up a device, run this script before you finish bringing it up.)

Otherwise, *when do you want that script to run* ?

Something like:
iface eth0 inet dhcp
    pre-up /usr/local/sbin/firewall $IFACE

Tells us that "when you bring up eth0, run this script"

Now, it may be that the way the actual /e/n/i parser runs, means that whenever it hits an include statement, it just continues its current parsing, so you could get this behavior with:
iface eth0 inet dhcp
  source interfaces.d/eth0.cfg

However, you're actually just relying on the "source interfaces.d/*" line.
Which means that maybe it gets associated with a device you want, but as soon as anything changes in that file, it may not get run at the right time.

Given the content of: https://pastebin.canonical.com/194078/

I think you're missing how pre-up and post-up are meant to be used. Specifically, you have lots of routes being added, but you aren't grouping the routes-being-added with the device-that-will-carry those routes.

For example:
auto ens3
iface ens3 inet static
    address 10.2.1.146/23
    gateway 10.2.0.88
    dns-nameservers 90.147.165.82
    mtu 1500
...
auto ens8
iface ens8 inet static
    address 10.2.4.166/24
    dns-nameservers 10.3.4.210
    mtu 1500
post-up route add -net 10.3.0.0 netmask 255.255.254.0 gw 10.2.0.1 metric 0 || true
pre-down route del -net 10.3.0.0 netmask 255.255.254.0 gw 10.2.0.1 metric 0 || true
post-up route add -net 10.4.0.0 netmask 255.255.254.0 gw 10.2.0.1 metric 0 || true
pre-down route del -net 10.4.0.0 netmask 255.255.254.0 gw 10.2.0.1 metric 0 || true
post-up route add -net 10.3.4.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 gw 10.2.4.1 metric 0 || true
pre-down route del -net 10.3.4.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 gw 10.2.4.1 metric 0 || true

That specifically says "when I ifup ens3" run *no* scripts. But when I "if up ens8" add routes for 10.3/16 via 10.2.0.1 and 10.4 via 10.2.0.1 and 10.3.4.0 via 10.2.4.1.

However, if you did:
 ifdown ens3
 ifup ens8
You would end up fairly broken, because now you have routes that say "if you want to get to 10.3.0.0/16 you should talk to 10.2.0.1", but the most likely device they would have wanted to use to *talk* to 10.2.0.1 was ens3 which is currently down.

More likely, what you actually want is:

auto ens3
iface ens3 inet static
    address 10.2.1.146/23
    gateway 10.2.0.88
    dns-nameservers 90.147.165.82
    mtu 1500
    post-up route add -net 10.3.0.0 netmask 255.255.254.0 gw 10.2.0.1 metric 0 || true
    pre-down route del -net 10.3.0.0 netmask 255.255.254.0 gw 10.2.0.1 metric 0 || true
    post-up route add -net 10.4.0.0 netmask 255.255.254.0 gw 10.2.0.1 metric 0 || true
    pre-down route del -net 10.4.0.0 netmask 255.255.254.0 gw 10.2.0.1 metric 0 || true

auto ens8
iface ens8 inet static
    address 10.2.4.166/24
    dns-nameservers 10.3.4.210
    mtu 1500
    post-up route add -net 10.3.4.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 gw 10.2.4.1 metric 0 || true
    pre-down route del -net 10.3.4.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 gw 10.2.4.1 metric 0 || true

(eg, when bringing up interface X, ensure to add routes that involve interface X)

Note that /e/n/i doesn't care about indenting. The indenting is there because it is more obvious for us humans reading the file.

We *could* implement support to treat an include without the included file itself being 'whole'. But that just leaves to people not understanding why making a change in file A broke some bit of configuration in file B.

Instead, you should be writing coherent configuration that we can both parse easily, and that will be stable in the face of future changes.