Samuel Thibault <sthiba...@debian.org> writes: > Vincent Bernat, on lun. 10 juil. 2017 20:55:29 +0200, wrote: > >> Other major distributions are using this new scheme (notably Ubuntu >> which has no reason to have users smarter than ours) > > The reasoning is the converse: non-techy users will just not be exposed > to interface names anyway. Debian users, however, tend to be more techy, > and do see these interface names. And basically *all* documentation > before this interface name change is now incomprehensible to techy > beginners.
Not only old docs, unfortunately. The change makes it impossible to describe system independent procedures involving a network device. As an example, I happen to get a few questions regarding LTE modem configuration. Most of these users will have a single modem, so I know the kernel network interface name is 'wwan0'. Previously I could ask a user to do e.g. 'ifconfig wwan0'. Now? Depending on how "techy" the user is, I may have to write more about netdev naming policies than the real issue. This isn't something I just made up. It is a real problem for me. And I only see a fraction of the problem. I can imagine the issues for those attempting to write any docs touching Linux networking.. > I'm really worried here: this change, like a lot others done recently, > is making the Linux ecosystem yet more complex to understand, thus > raising the barrier for techy beginners yet higher. Yes. And what is most worrying is all the excuses made, often claiming the opposite. We are all going to laugh at enp0s31f6. But it looks like we are looking at a couple of years of breakage first, before the advocates move on to some other shiny project where they can solve a problem that didn't exist before they entered the scene. Bjørn
