Comment 45 for bug 8980

In Maverick, NetworkManager already does rewrite /etc/hosts with some amounts of success.

FWIW, I can also pretty nicely workaround having the FQDN available or not by adding just the domain part in /etc/domainname. It's not pretty but it does work, and from there on connection I have /etc/hosts looking like this:

10.13.18.19 demeter.cyphermox.net demeter # Added by NetworkManager
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
::1 demeter.cyphermox.net demeter localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6
127.0.1.1 demeter

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1 localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters

Without something in /etc/domainname only the shortname is available, but that still does the right thing for the majority of users (I think)... no?