[arch-general] Why there is no NetworkManager in ArchISO

[Eli Schwartz]

On 07/24/2017 01:50 AM, Martin Kühne via arch-general wrote:
> Network manager actually limits users in that, when started, it plugs
> its own configuration atop of whatever the user is doing manually.
> Some features you might need are not supported like setting up a
> bridge, too. Additionally, the wiki [0] lists quite a list of other
> problems you might have from using it, so... what was the question?
> Why the devs choose not to include it in the default distribution?
> 
> Read up on systemd-networkd [1], and if you need wifi, wpa_supplicant
> [2], and tell us why you still think you want to force other people to
> use a suboptimal solution so you don't have to figure out how simply
> text based, system-wide configuration by the root user is better for
> you... Did we not yet go into how nm needs to figure out in what ways
> a user is allowed to configure a system's network and therefore
> uses... policikit? Eww.

This bears repeating... netctl is a hundred times worse than polkit
could ever hope to be.

NetworkManager too, uses "text-based, system-wide configuration by the
root user", as though that were supposed to make some sort of difference.

Asking people to use wpa_supplicant by hand, on the archiso, strikes me
as somewhat sadistic. Mostly because the majority of people IMHO don't
care about the holy purity of breaking every task up into the smallest
possible pieces to do separately, by hand.

I mean, we already have netctl on the archiso, therefore your advice is
already silly -- no one uses wpa_supplicant by hand on the archiso to
begin with. We'd just trade one (incredibly fragile, frequently
malfunctioning) autoconfigurator, netctl, with another (extremely
capable, rarely ever malfunctioning) autoconfigurator, NetworkManager.

As always, if you really like wpa_supplicant, or prefer systemd-networkd
because you're installing to a wired system, you are free to do that. No
one advocated adding Networkmanager to the "base" group (although I
would like netctl to be *removed* from it).

-- 
Eli Schwartz

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