Manual interfaces do not come up

Confirmed via testing on a seperate VM.

Looking at the source of ifupdown-0.7~beta2ubuntu11/ifupdown.nw the following change appears to be the cause:

ip link set dev %iface% [[mtu %mtu%]] [[address %hwaddress%]] up

...

Yes, package compiled without that line and interface now comes up. why...

OK, the "up" line above is run _before_ the up lines in /etc/network/interfaces, at which point the vlan doesn't exist.

Modifying the interfaces stanza as follows resolves the issue:

# VLAN 3
auto reporter1
iface reporter1 inet manual
        pre-up ip l s dev intpub up
        pre-up vconfig add intpub 3
        pre-up ip l s dev intpub.3 name reporter1
        up ip l s dev reporter1 up
        up ip a a xx.xx.xx.xx/29 dev reporter1
        up ip a a 2403:9800:xx:xx::1/64 dev reporter1
        down ip a del xx.xx.xx.xx/29 dev reporter1
        down ip l s dev reporter1 down
        down vconfig rem reporter1

So, not sure if this is a bug exactly, but the change made in the latest patch DOES break existing functionality while attempting to add new features, this is (in my opinion) unacceptable for a stable version package update.

Perhaps the new up directive should be wrapped in a conditional, only run if one or both of "mtu" and "hwaddress" are actually defined?

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

I was also surprised when I found my GRE tunnels didn't come up after applying precise-updates.
It took me half an hour to find that it was due to ifupdown.
strace(8) helped me to find ifup was aborted at "ip link set dev gre1 up" without preceding "ip tunnel add gre1 ..."

 auto gre1
 iface gre1 inet manual
- up ip tunnel add gre1 mode gre local 10.134.126.59 remote 172.16.17.4
- up ip link set gre1 up
+ pre-up ip tunnel add gre1 mode gre local 10.134.126.59 remote 172.16.17.4
     up ip link set gre1 mtu 1400
     up ip addr add 10.202.252.253/30 dev gre1