Comment 37 for bug 959037

What lies behind the problem being discussed here is the simple fact that there exists no single adequate network configuration utility for GNU/Linux. I am most familiar with Debian. From Debian we inherit ifupdown which was designed for static configuration. Debian developers have known for more than ten years that ifupdown needed to be replaced, but have never managed to come up with a replacement. From RedHat we get NetworkManager which was never intended to be a general network configurer but in the absence of any alternative continues to be enhanced with new features. Considerable effort has obviously been spent in Ubuntu just to get NM to coexist with other networking packages. It still doesn't fully cooperate with them (see #47379 for another example) and will probably never be well integrated with them.

So we are still forced to choose between two network configuration approaches, NM-oriented in the desktop version and ifupdown-oriented in the server version. Each one has its limitations. If you try to combine the two, as you (Alkis) want to do, then you are confronted with these limitations. You are lucky that all you have to do is comment out one line in a configuration file to get things to work!

We can continue playing around with the existing tools so that they work better in particular use cases but what we really need is a properly designed network configuration utility to supersede both ifupdown and NM.

I am vaguely aware of the Wicd project. Must go read up on that.