James Hogarth has posted a nice mail to the CentOS mailing list on why we shouldn't hate NetworkManager anymore and linked to a very good article on the nmcli. One should bookmark this for future reference.
I used to loathe things that make life easy by trying to "wrap things up" since they make edge cases significantly harder to resolve (and what I mean by edge cases is, servers) but I give up. Life is too short arguing about such things on and on. Eventually things get resolved and people move on I guess and I got to accept NetworkManager instead of fighting against it doing stupid things against my will. Hopefully enough things have been fixed so that it's now sane enough.
I am still against distributions doing "their own things" on such fundamental levels, I accept that I do not matter in the big scheme of things.
IMHO, such basic operations like networking should be standardized across platforms so that we can achieve such operations w/o worrying about such stupid things. I should expect to have certain things always in my service...
Oh well..
