Comment 3 for bug 1347859

Thank you for taking the time to file this and helping to make Ubuntu better. I appreciate your detailed write-up and understand your frustration at the changes made.

Before going into policy questions, I'd like to clear up a couple of factual concerns I have after reading your report. I think it'd be useful to clarify these first so that opinions can be formed based on accurate facts.

My first concern is that you say that you ended up with interfaces renamed according to biosdevname after a release upgrade when they weren't being renamed before the release upgrade. As far as I understand, this was never the intention and upon examination I can see no code that would cause this to happen. My understanding is that the biosdevname package that does the renaming is only installed at first install time by the installer, and not installed after that. A release upgrade should not cause biosdevname to get installed. So can you (or someone) please confirm that this is definitely the behaviour in some case, and if so provide steps to reproduce so that we can understand the mechanism involved here that is making this happen? I suggest that you do this in a separate bug against biosdevname to start with (eg. "Interfaces get renamed on release upgrades") so that if it is a bug that can be fixed without any policy-level discussion then we can do it without cluttering this bug.

Second, you say that some distributions require both systemd and biosdevname interface renaming to be disabled. My understanding is that on Ubuntu with systemd (so Vivid only), we do not rename interfaces via systemd by default - this must be done explicitly. Can we assume for the rest of the discussion that this is true, or otherwise can you provide steps to reproduce that demonstrate that it is not (again, another bug might be a good idea to avoid cluttering this one)?