LWN: Comments on "Release for CentOS Linux 7 (1611) on x86_64" https://lwn.net/Articles/708893/ This is a special feed containing comments posted to the individual LWN article titled "Release for CentOS Linux 7 (1611) on x86_64". en-us Fri, 03 Oct 2025 20:28:38 +0000 Fri, 03 Oct 2025 20:28:38 +0000 https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification lwn@lwn.net Release for CentOS Linux 7 (1611) on x86_64 https://lwn.net/Articles/709061/ https://lwn.net/Articles/709061/ drag <div class="FormattedComment"> <font class="QuotedText">&gt; Now, nmcli is tightly bound to Gnome, as far as I can tell,</font><br> <p> I don't think there is any Gnome dependencies for nmcli. <br> <p> <font class="QuotedText">&gt; That "lacking features" parts makes me wonder if the nmcli invocation listed might have issues occasionally, leaving you with a chicken/egg problem for getting your networking up.</font><br> <p> If you actually use it you don't need to speculate on any potential 'chicken and egg issue'. <br> <p> Nmcli is actually very nice and has no issues being used to fully configure common network setups involving things like bonding, bridging, wifi and such tasks. The only issue I have with it is that it's a bit confusing to get started with it. <br> <p> The only real limitation I have, and it's a NetworkManager one, is when you are dealing with 'foreign' types of network interfaces that are started by other tools/applications. Things like trying to use N-M to try to configure Tinc VPN devices or work with custom setups using Openvswitch bridges is troublesome. I don't know what to do to 'import' them as I would like to take advantage of things like firewalld integration and ip address configuration rather then using ifconfig/ip commands. <br> <p> The plus side of nmcli and network-manager over other solutions is it's ability to dynamically configure things and makes scripting and automation of network configurations a LOT easier then more traditional 'edit this script-config file, restart networking, and hope for the best' approach. Using a shell script and nmcli to configure bonding and vlan interfaces for a bunch of servers is something that is relatively trivial now. <br> </div> Wed, 14 Dec 2016 04:18:40 +0000 Release for CentOS Linux 7 (1611) on x86_64 https://lwn.net/Articles/709028/ https://lwn.net/Articles/709028/ smcv <div class="FormattedComment"> developer.gnome.org has documentation for various libraries, services and other APIs that are considered to be useful to GNOME developers, independent of whether they are exclusively used by GNOME (many aren't GNOME-specific).<br> <p> The mention of "unstable" in the URL <a href="https://developer.gnome.org/NetworkManager/unstable/">https://developer.gnome.org/NetworkManager/unstable/</a> refers to it being the documentation for the latest unstable/development version of NM, currently version 1.5.2. It is not a comment on the stability or instability of NM as a project. <a href="https://developer.gnome.org/NetworkManager/stable/">https://developer.gnome.org/NetworkManager/stable/</a> also exists, and currently documents NM 1.4.2 (from the 1.4.x stable branch).<br> <p> NetworkManager has the same branching structure as most (all?) GNOME projects and many freedesktop.org projects, which was borrowed from Linux versions before 3.0. In that branching structure, x.odd.z versions are unstable/development branches which are a moving target, not guaranteed to have a stable API (if the current development branch is 1.5.x, then features up to and including 1.4.x are safe to use, but features added in 1.5.x are not guaranteed stable until 1.6.0), and will not receive bugfix-only post-release updates; meanwhile, x.even.z versions are stable-branches with a fixed API, and can have bugfix-only post-release updates (z &gt; 0).<br> <p> NetworkManager seems to be run as a partially GNOME and partially freedesktop.org project. It uses GNOME infrastructure for bug tracking, and follows GNOME's 6 month release cycle (I think), but its official git repository is on freedesktop.org. It isn't particularly tightly coupled to GNOME: many other UIs exist. It would probably be more accurate to say that GNOME is tightly coupled to NetworkManager (GNOME Shell has native support for NM, but not for alternatives).<br> <p> <font class="QuotedText">&gt; the GUI tool should be calling the CLI tool (or the library that underlies both)</font><br> <p> In this case the GUIs (GNOME Shell, nm-applet, plasma-nm, etc.) call into the same libraries or D-Bus APIs as the CLI tool.<br> <p> I would hope that by now, open source OSs are sufficiently mature that we've generally got past the days of writing "GUI frontends" as an afterthought, wrapping a developer-oriented CLI tool, and instead have library APIs that both a GUI and a CLI can use.<br> </div> Tue, 13 Dec 2016 22:11:07 +0000 Release for CentOS Linux 7 (1611) on x86_64 https://lwn.net/Articles/709021/ https://lwn.net/Articles/709021/ pizza <div class="FormattedComment"> Both the CLI and the GUI directly call into the NetworkManager library/daemon.<br> <p> In this particular case, I believe the GUI came first. <br> <p> BTW, it is fine to not install the GUI (and GNOME) at all; indeed I did just that with a minimal install of Fedora 25 over the weekend. It uses NetworkManager for the ethernet interfaces and does not have any sort of desktop environment installed.<br> </div> Tue, 13 Dec 2016 20:42:45 +0000 Release for CentOS Linux 7 (1611) on x86_64 https://lwn.net/Articles/709018/ https://lwn.net/Articles/709018/ Tara_Li <div class="FormattedComment"> The thing that bothers me a bit is<br> <p> <font class="QuotedText">&gt; Commonly used utilities such as ifconfig/netstat have been marked as deprecated for</font><br> <font class="QuotedText">&gt; some considerable time and the 'net-tools' package is no longer part of the @core</font><br> <font class="QuotedText">&gt; group so will not be installed by default. Use nmcli c up ifname &lt;interfacename&gt; to</font><br> <font class="QuotedText">&gt; get your network up and running and use yum to install the package if you really</font><br> <font class="QuotedText">&gt; need it. Kickstart users can pull in the net-tools package as part of the install.</font><br> <p> Now, nmcli is tightly bound to Gnome, as far as I can tell, and the Gnome Developer's docs has it stored as "unstable" - <a href="https://developer.gnome.org/NetworkManager/unstable/nmcli.html">https://developer.gnome.org/NetworkManager/unstable/nmcli...</a> - the Fedora Project wiki <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Networking/CLI">https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Networking/CLI</a> says "nmcli maybe contain some bugs and lack some features graphical tools for NetworkManager have." Now, I can understand differing bugs, and there is the inate difference, of course, in a CLI tool vs a GUI tool, but in general, the GUI tool should be the one lacking features compared to the CLI tool - the GUI tool should be calling the CLI tool (or the library that underlies both).<br> <p> That "lacking features" parts makes me wonder if the nmcli invocation listed might have issues occasionally, leaving you with a chicken/egg problem for getting your networking up.<br> </div> Tue, 13 Dec 2016 20:33:50 +0000 Release for CentOS Linux 7 (1611) on x86_64 https://lwn.net/Articles/708925/ https://lwn.net/Articles/708925/ bucky <div class="FormattedComment"> The "Known Issues" section is probably what they were referring to.<br> <p> It has some "if this is going on, then you need to do this other thing" items, which matches the "upgrade strategies" concept in spirit, if not by name.<br> </div> Tue, 13 Dec 2016 15:47:54 +0000 Release for CentOS Linux 7 (1611) on x86_64 https://lwn.net/Articles/708920/ https://lwn.net/Articles/708920/ clugstj <div class="FormattedComment"> Maybe it's just me, but I can't see any mention of upgrade strategies in the release notes.<br> </div> Tue, 13 Dec 2016 13:11:49 +0000