Steve Litt <slitt@???> wrote:

> Of all the escapades of FreeDesktop.Org, managers of Lennart and the
> Redhats, these name thingies are some of the least onerous. I put a
> shellscript on the list a few months ago that delivers the wifi device
> name, and that script can be used in init scripts and the like.
>
> I mean, by all means use it as a talking point, but if it's actually
> giving you trouble, look up my shellscript and use it.

It's not giving me trouble, I'm still on Wheezy, and I use udev rules to rename interfaces to meaningful names anyway.

But, I get the impression you only run "simple" systems. Once you start having firewalls (interface names in config file(s)), monitoring (interface names in config file(s)), data collection (interface names in config file(s)), ... it stops being something that you can "fix" with a script that will tell you what your interface is called today. Well, I suppose you can use the script to find out the name of the interface, and then expand that to hack all the other scripts/config file before the relevant services start ... hmm, isn't that the systemd way, create a mess and then create more mess to fix the problems caused by the first mess, and then ...

So yes, for a "simple" desktop/laptop environment it might not be an issue, but for non-simple stuff it does matter. For the sort of stuff I work with, the old udev way works just fine, and I mean just fine. Interfaces don't change very often, and when they do it's a quick and simple fix (edit 70-persistent-net-rules) that only needs to be done in one place.

Or TL;DR - the "new" way sucks big time. In fixing a non-problem for several classes of user, they've created a much bigger problem for them.