Comment 56 for bug 8980

Looking through this again, while I agree there might be a need to clarify the way that the fqdn, /etc/hostname and /etc/hosts files and such are being used, this is not a bug in NetworkManager and as far as I am concerned, NM is doing what it should (and so is netcfg, but I'll let Colin close that one if he wants to).

The documentation on what hostname is reporting and why is available on all systems via the 'man hostname' command, with extra information in the manual pages for dnsdomainname; and the implementation is further defined in getdomainname(2) and getaddrinfo(3). The jist of it: if you're using NIS/YP, it's a different matter, but if you're using DNS, you can change what will appear to be the domain name via /etc/hosts (and the value is set there by the installer or modified by the admin, which is the right thing to do) for the 'hostname -f' call, but ultimately the real FQDN is what the resolver returns for the IP address -- that's external to the machine, you can't change it with any local configuration file.

We've covered why NM will not be changing /etc/hosts from DHCP results in bug 659817. TL;DR: it's Very Wrong (tm).

I'm closing the NetworkManager task for this as "Invalid", hopefully we can now lay this to rest for all eternity :)