wireless devices are not managed when installing from alternate

I've tested this on a system running a few different types of configurations for network device and modifying /etc/network/interfaces manually to add a few other possible configurations; I think I got the script pretty much to where it should be now.

+ lines=`ifquery $i | grep -v metric | sed 's/://' | sed 's/ /[[:space:]]*/'`
+ sed -i -e "s/\(^iface.*$i.*dhcp\)/#NetworkManager#\1/" $NIF_FILE
+ for line in $lines; do
+ sed -i -e "s/^\([[:space:]]*$line\)/#NetworkManager#\1/" $NIF_FILE
+ done

This relies on two assumptions that may not hold true:

 - that the only occurrence of the line in the file is for the interface which is being disabled
 - that the contents of the line work in a sed command - i.e., they contain no special characters, including '/', '$', '*'...

I think it would be better to do a single sed command that detects the start and end of the stanza and applies the s/// to all lines in it. E.g.:

  sed -i -e"/^[[:space:]]*iface[[:space:]]\+$i[[:space:]]\+.*dhcp/,/^[[:space:]]*\(iface\|auto\|mapping\|source\|allow-\)/ { /^[[:space:]]*iface[[:space:]]\+$i[[:space:]]\+.*dhcp/ s/^/#NetworkManager#//; /^[[:space:]]*\(iface\|auto\|mapping\|source\|allow-\) ! s/^/#NetworkManager#//; }" /etc/network/interfaces

(Can probably be done more elegantly with awk than with sed)

> /^[[:space:]]*\(iface\|auto\|mapping\|source\|allow-\) ! s/^/#NetworkManager#//;

I mean

 /^[[:space:]]*\(iface\|auto\|mapping\|source\|allow-\)/ ! s/^/#NetworkManager#//;

of course ;)

Indeed, that works with some tiny fixes:

sed -i -e"/^[[:space:]]*iface[[:space:]]\+$i[[:space:]]\+.*dhcp/,/^[[:space:]]*\(iface\|auto\|mapping\|source\|allow-\)/ { /^[[:space:]]*iface[[:space:]]\+$i[[:space:]]\+.*dhcp/ s/^/#NetworkManager#/; /^[[:space:]]*\(iface\|auto\|mapping\|source\|allow-\)/ ! s/^[^#]/#NetworkManager#/; }" /etc/network/interfaces

(just getting rid of the double #NetworkManager# comments for the iface line; and typos for the /'s.

Nitpick: 'grep -qc' could just be 'grep -q'. Also, please fix that regex to enforce whitespace on either side of $i, so that e.g. "eth1" doesn't match "eth10", and to match the sed regexes you're using: for example 'grep -q "^[[:space:]]*iface[[:space:]]\+$i[[:space:]].*dhcp"'.

In the sed regexes above, the \+ after the third [[:space:]] is superfluous, because it's followed by .* anyway.

Otherwise I have little to add to what Steve said. I can add another reason why the ifquery approach is problematic: you have to filter out "metric" variables that were automatically added by ifupdown, but the current ifquery interface doesn't allow you to distinguish between "metric" variables that it added itself and ones that were written explicitly in /etc/network/interfaces. The sed approach would fix that.

It seems unfortunate that this script has a .sh extension, as at this point it would really be more readable in some other language!

This bug was fixed in the package network-manager - 0.9.2.0+git201202161854.8572ecf-0ubuntu7

---------------
network-manager (0.9.2.0+git201202161854.8572ecf-0ubuntu7) precise; urgency=low

  * debian/ifblacklist_migrate.sh: simplify the script and fix the logic to
    comment out any configuration under devices that are configured
    automatically to use DHCP, since in those cases NetworkManager will pick
    things up. (LP: #948217)
 -- Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre <email address hidden> Thu, 08 Mar 2012 13:56:38 -0500