NM does not completely handle default route

[Gene Czarcinski <gene czarc net>]

OK, this is a followup to a lot of my previous email about NM handling the 
default route when a system has multiple NICs.

I have closed out my BZ report for Fedora 11 as WONTFIX -- 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=523875 -- and have opened a new 
report against rawhide -- https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=528281

I do not expect that this problem will be fixed in time for F12 GA but hope 
that it can be fixed post GA.

I have been poking around the NM source code mainly with grep and gedit.  I 
believe it is possible/practical to fix things with any big re-write (which I 
believe is neither practical or desirable). [sure is a lot of code]  I mainly 
looked at how GATEWAYDEV=, GATEWAY=, and ONBOOT= (and their 
~/.gconf/system/networking/ counterparts) where handled.

Some characteristics/constraints --

1.  Having a system with one or more NICs and no default route is a valid 
configuration and should (must?) be supported by NM.

2. Regardless of having a default route or not, some connections should never 
be the default route (the intent, I believe, of the current implementation).

3.  Having GATEWAYDEV=xxx in /etc/sysconfig/network will cause all NICs other 
than xxx to be marked as "never-default".  This is and should continue to be 
supported.

4. Only if a NIC is marked as NOT for all users can I mark it for "connection 
only" (never-default).  This needs to be fixed.  I should be able to mark a NIC 
which is available to all users (an ifcfg-xxx system configuration in 
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/) as a "connection only" (never-default) NIC.

5.  I should be able to mark a NIC as the default route device.  I think this 
is needed for completeness but am not sure it is really required.

6.  If two or more NICs with static IPs are configured with different default 
route, I do not care ... this is a mis-configuration.

7.  The problem is not really with NICs that have static IPs but with those 
that use dhcp where each dhcp server supplies a default route.