NetworkManager is a software to provide an API for configuring the network on Linux. It aims to make configuration simple and reliable.
A new NetworkManager version 1.28.0 was released today, on 6th December 2020.
1.28 was already in release candidate phase for several weeks. That is longer than usual or planned, but there were some issues related to DNS which delayed the release. In the future, we should do a better job at sticking to more regular release schedules.
See the NEWS file for what is new and find the release tarball at the GNOME download page.
This release introduces no big features, but instead there are a lot of small fixes and improvements. I only would like to highlight two points that are more important to developers and maintainers:
- Fixes for building NetworkManager with LTO. Building with Link Time Optimization tends to reveal issues, especially because we want NetworkManager to build without emitting compiler warnings. Now that Fedora 33 enables LTO by default, we fixed some remaining issues and have tests that continuously check that the build works.
- We now reformatted our entire C source code with clang-format. The advantage is that our coding style is now governed by the code formatter and there is no more need to argue about trivialities. In particular we now use spaces for indentation, contrary to before, when tabs were used for indentation and spaces for horizontal alignment. Such so called “smart tabs” were cumbersome for contributors to get right, also because editors don’t support that style well. The downside is that this introduces a huge source code diff between 1.26 and 1.28 and makes backporting code to 1.26 harder.