Hi,
We're well aware the discussion regarding #688772 has gone down a path that
can do lots of harm to the project and the Debian GNOME team in particular,
so we feel its time for other team members to jump into this thread and get
our share of the fun in an attempt to reconduct the discussion to a more
balanced and less emotional level.

Sjoerd, Michael, and I have been talking most of the day and trying to
bring alternatives to the current two irreconciliable positions (ie, force
NM or not force NM).

First of all, we want to make clear that the position Joss has been defending
on this exhausting thread is shared by most, if not all, of the GNOME team
members. In other words, we all consider NM an important and integral part
of the desktop system we're delivering, and its absence does degrade its
operation in such a way we find inacceptable.

We're aware many of the technical reasons presented here have been rebated
due to not being strong enough, but we'll make them explicit again for
completeness:

GNOME developers rely on NM not for fun but for a number of reasons. It's not
an arbitrary requirement, even if GNOME Shell can run without it. Network
Manager allows GNOME to:
- Access all present networking technologies (VPN, Wireless, 3G) via an
  integrated, very prominent icon in the main desktop bar.
- Networking needs have changed over the past years and has become much more
  dynamic and diverse. Connecting to the internet via wireless, 3G or VPN
  should be painless and easy.
- Only NetworkManager currently offers this kind of features, ifupdown is too
  static/cumbersome to setup, wicd is too limited in functionality.
- GNOME upstream developers embraced NetworkManager as an external dependency
  and seamlessly integrated them into various parts of the desktop:
  
on/offline detection
====================
- GNOME relies on NetworkManager's D-Bus messages to establish if the system
  has a working network connection or not, and how to behave in either case.
  Applications like Evolution or Empathy will only try to fetch mail if NM says
  there's an appropriate network link, avoiding errors like "Could not connect
  to IMAP server". Epiphany will enable offline mode automatically, etc.
  
better integration / software behaving more intelligently
=========================================================
- PackageKit will avoid costly downloads when you're on 3G setting up new
  connections is easy
- integration into gnome-control-center
- setting up a new wireless connection requires a single click

upgrade problem
===============
- NetworkManager was first introduced in lenny, the first release installing
  recommends by default.
- NetworkManager 0.6 in lenny was very limited, e.g. only supported DHCP.
- network-manager-gnome has been added a Recommends to the "gnome" meta-package
  in lenny.
- Misusing Recommends was a widespread problem in lenny, so quite a few users
  disabled Recommends back then.
  
WICD case
=========
Adding some preinst logic to present some debconf (similar to how we currently
manage multiple display managers like gdm and kdm which can be installed at the
same time) ? this should deal with the concerns that pulling NM in on a wheezy
upgrade will break systems already running wicd, by warning about this
possibility and offering via a debconf prompt to disable NM entirely issuing a
update-rc.d call.