NetworkManager doesn't really care what the interfaces are named
of
course, so that problem should be solved. I can see two problems with
skipping the config stuff in network-scripts and sysconfig-networking:
1) kernel module autoloading. Current process: /etc/rc.d/init.d/network
loads the kernel modules itself by reading
sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* and reading the device, then asks
modprobe (which reads modprobe.conf) what the device name is, then has
modprobe load it. NetworkManager process: asks hal for network devices.
Unfortunately, hal doesn't know that a device is network device until its
kernel module is loaded, which never happens. So we have to keep the
ifcfg-* stuff around until we start autoloading kernel modules when the
device is present (which sounds just fine to me).
Not fine to a lot of servers, though. Sometimes you have multiple nics
in a machine and you don't want certain ones even coming up if you can
avoid it. Maybe they're a heartbeat backup nic or maybe they're an
onboard nic that plays hell with your bios. It doesn't matter, simply
loading a driver b/c the device is in the machine will piss off a lot of
people who appreciate being able to control what their system does.
-sv