Package: ifupdown-ng Version: 0.12.1-7 Severity: normal Tags: patch Dear Maintainer,
I recently upgraded a bookworm to trixie. However, after the reboot, the system did not bring up any network interfaces apart from lo. (This being a headless system managed over the network was a minor inconveniency.) I believe the following is what happened. The system is configured NOT to install Recommends, i.e. it has APT::Install-Recommends "false"; The system (initially installed as bookworm 1.5 years ago) is set up to use ifupdown-ng to bring up its nerwork interfaces. The apt-get dist-upgrade went smoothly - as always. However, after boot, the only network interface that was brought up was lo, leaving the system unreachable (except via BMC). The obvious expectation was that the interfaces configured in /etc/network/interfaces.d (sourced by /etc/network/interfaces) would be brought up and the system reachable. I believe this happened because of the two conditions above: ifupdown-ng manages network and apt does not install recommends: there is a mysterious entry in ifupdown-ng's changelog from 2023: "Fix upgrade path from stable not installing ifupdown compat" which - in hindsight - I presume meant that ifupdown-ng-compat package was created and added as Recommends to ifupdown-ng. You see where this goes: not installing Recommnds leaves the system without ifupdown-ng-compat and hence without networking.service, hence nothing tries to bring the interfaces up. While this is probably a rather uncommon corner case, I still believe this is a "bug" that needs to be addressed, but how? I agree Recommends is appropriate instead of Depends, so I guess the only remaining option is a note in Trixie (and maybe also in Forky) upgrade/release notes chapter 5 (or maybe 4.5?), so at least other admins of headless systems using ifupdown-ng have a chance of noticing this before rebooting. Cheers, Juha P.S. After installing ifupdown-ng-compat, the networking.service was left in a disabled state - I have no opinion of whether that's better or worse than enabling it, but this should also be mentioned in whatever note is written about this: just installing the package is not sufficient. -- System Information: Debian Release: 13.1 APT prefers stable-updates APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable-security'), (500, 'stable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 6.12.43+deb13-amd64 (SMP w/32 CPU threads; PREEMPT) Kernel taint flags: TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE, TAINT_OOT_MODULE, TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB:en Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) LSM: AppArmor: enabled Versions of packages ifupdown-ng depends on: ii adduser 3.152 ii iproute2 6.15.0-1 ii libbsd0 0.12.2-2 ii libc6 2.41-12 Versions of packages ifupdown-ng recommends: ii ifupdown-ng-compat 0.12.1-7 ii isc-dhcp-client [dhcp-client] 4.4.3-P1-8 pn rdnssd <none> Versions of packages ifupdown-ng suggests: pn ppp <none> -- no debconf information
