Last time I’ve used network-manager..

Theres an ongoing thread on the Debian mailing lists about making network-manager installed by default on new Debian installations. I won’t say much about the thread. Its just a prototype example for Debian project discussions: Discuss everything to death and if its dead discuss a little more. And – very important – always restate the same arguments as often as you can. Or if its not your own argument you restate, restate the arguments of others. Ending with 100 times stated the same argument. Even if its already disproved.

I don’t have a strong opinion about the topic in itself. However there is something I find kinda funny. A statement brought up by the people who strongly oppose network-manager as a default.
A statetement I’ve heard so often that I can’t count it anymore.

The last time I’ve tried network-manager it sucked.

It often comes in different masquerades, like:

network-manager is crap.
network-manager is totally unusable
network-manager does not even manage to keep the network connection during upgrades

But it basically boils down to that basic essence of the sentence I’ve written above. Sometimes I ask people who express this opinion a simple question:

When did you test network-manager the last time?

The answers are different but again the basic essence of the answers is mostly the same (even if people would never say it that way):

A long time ago. Must have been around Etch.

And guess what: There was a time when I had a similar opinion. Must have been around Etch.
During the life cycle of network-manager between Etch and now a lot has happened. I restarted using network-manager at some point of the Lenny development.
My daily driver for the management of my network connections on my notebook. Yes, together with ifupdown because, yes, network-manager does not support every possible network-setup with all of the special cases possible. But it supports auto-configuring of wired and wireless devices. Connecting to a new encrypted network, either in a WLAN or in a 802.1x LAN, using UMTS devices, using tethering with a smart phone. And everything: on a few mouse-clicks.

Yes, it had some rough edges in that life cycle. Yes, it had that nasty upgrade bug, which was very annoying.

But face it: It developed a lot. Here are some numbers:

Diffstat between the etch version and the lenny version:

362 files changed, 36589 insertions(+), 36684 deletions(-)

Diffstat between the Lenny version and the current version in sid:

763 files changed, 112713 insertions(+), 56361 deletions(-)

The upgrade bug has been solved recently. Late. But better late then never.

So what does that mean? It means that, if your last network-manager experience was made with Lenny or even worse around Etch, you should better give it another try, if you are interested in knowing what you talk about. For now it seems that a lot of people do not know. Not even in a distance.

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