"Alias=" missing from NetworkManager.service

[Steve Dodd]

Version: 1.10.6-2ubuntu1
Ubuntu release: 18.04

I've just had a fun few minutes wondering why I couldn't disable NM using "systemctl disable network-manager.service". Looks like the real unit file is NetworkManager.service, and the former is a symlink.

Per systemd.unit(5), "unit files may specify aliases through the Alias= directive in the [Install] section" which allows the aliases to be used in systemctl disable etc. - so this might be a cleaner approach and would presumably solve the problem of lusers like me guessing unit names ..

[Alan Baghumian (alanbach)]

The network-manager package in Bionic and Focal install as symlink to NetworkManager.service correctly:

https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?searchon=contents&keywords=network-manager.service&mode=exactfilename&suite=bionic&arch=any

https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?searchon=contents&keywords=network-manager.service&mode=exactfilename&suite=focal&arch=any

However this has gone missing from Jammy onward:

https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=jammy&arch=any&mode=exactfilename&searchon=contents&keywords=network-manager.service

https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=kinetic&arch=any&mode=exactfilename&searchon=contents&keywords=network-manager.service

https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=lunar&arch=any&mode=exactfilename&searchon=contents&keywords=network-manager.service

This can potentially break historical scripts / workloads that use the network-manager.service name and would be nice to fix.

Looking at Debian packages, this is present on Stretch (9), Buster (10) and Bullseye (11). It seems like it was dropped with Bookworm, however it was re-added back to Sid.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.