network-admin could be a frontend to /etc/network/interfaces and ifupdown

[Lucas Nussbaum]

network-admin is reinventing the wheel. ifupdown can already manage locations
through logical interfaces in ifupdown, and it would be easy to just write a
frontend to /etc/network/interfaces (which is also much more feature-complete).

Because of bug 13727 and others, network-admin seems to be quite unusable.
Something like that is really needed for all roaming users. Maybe a bounty could
be allocated to help fix this ?

[David Mandelberg (dseomn)]

I agree, but I don't think it should be a frontend to all of /e/n/i. I think it
should use something like update-grub's begin/end comments so that the admin
doesn't change anything important by accident.

For example, /e/n/i could look like:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

### BEGIN GNOME-NETWORK-ADMIN SECTION ###
# Do not change anything between the above line and
# "END GNOME-NEWTORK-ADMIN SECTION", use gnome-network-admin instead

<stuff>

### END GNOME-NETWORK-ADMIN SECTION ###

This could keep lo from showing up in g-n-a. If this is done, I think the best
way to use it by default would be to put "fake" interfaces that the end user
doesn't care about (e.g. lo, hotplug) in the static part and put "real"
interfaces into the g-n-a part.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into
our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find.

This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 19419.