NetworkManager 1.50 Released - Now Ensures Offensive Terms Don't Appear In Settings

NetworkManager 1.50 released on Wednesday as the newest version of this software commonly used on the Linux desktop for managing wired and wireless network connections.

Among the changes to find with NetworkManager 1.50 are deprecating "dhclient" support in favor of their own internal DHCP client, support for configuring virtual Ethernet (veth) interfaces in the nmtui utility, ndisc now supports multiple gateways for a single network, support for configuring the WiFi channel width within AP mode, and other changes. This isn't the most exciting release of NetworkManager in recent memory but still has a number of changes worth mentioning.

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NetworkManager-1.50
Overview of changes since NetworkManager-1.48
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* The support for "dhclient" has been deprecated, not built unless explicitely enabled, and will be removed in a future release. The internal DHCP client should be used instead and has been the default since version 1.20 (1.12 when built with meson).
* Support matching a OVS system interface by MAC address.
* Add a timeout option to connectivity checking.
* Support configuring veth interfaces in nmtui.
* When looking up the system hostname from the reverse DNS lookup of addresses configured on interfaces, NetworkManager now takes into account the content of /etc/hosts.
* Revert to using sysctl ipv6.conf.default for ip6-privacy
* Allow specifying a system OVS interface by MAC address
* ndisc: Support multiple gateways for a single network
* wifi: Support configuring channel-width in AP mode
* keyfile: Stop writing offensive terms into keyfiles
* Support reapplying the VLANs on bridge ports.
* Fix crash caused by malformed LLDP package if debug log is enabled
* Retry hostname resolution when it fails

I was also curious what NetworkManager was doing with ensuring offensive terms aren't written into keyfiles, which is the file format for specifying connection profiles/settings. NetworkManager is now ensuring that settings don't appear within the keyfile data for auto-connect slaves, master, slave type, or MAC address blacklist. These settings terms were previously deprecated and now NetworkManager is taking the extra step to ensure these offensive terms do not end up appearing in any of the keyfile data. Red Hat pursued this as part of their conscious language efforts ahead of the RHEL 10 beta. Details within this commit for those interested.

NetworkManager 1.50 is now available via the FreeDesktop.org GitLab.