Comment 4 for bug 729091

Sorry for taking so long to revisit this.

Fortunately I use etckeeper, so I have the history of my /etc/hosts file tracked back over the last 15 months, back to what looks like initial installation of the system. (I don't remember exactly when I installed)

Looking back over it in detail, it confirms your comment #3 - NM has indeed always (wrongly) been putting the machine's hostname in as the first entry in the localhost IP addresses. What seems to have changed in this particular update is the criteria by which NM decides whether it needs to rewrite the hosts file.

It appears that on 2010-09-21 I had a fight with NM and determined that adding "localhost6" to my ::1 hosts entry would convince the NM of that time that it did not need to rewrite the file.

From that time until 2011-02-26, NM left my hosts file alone. This date is in line with the referenced SRU package being made available in maverick-proposed.

The content of my /etc/hosts file which NM@maverick-release was willing to leave alone was:

=======================================================
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
192.168.2.180 altimeter.mxtelecom.com altimeter

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback localhost6
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
ff02::3 ip6-allhosts
=======================================================

NM@maverick-proposed rewrote this to:

=======================================================
127.0.0.1 altimeter localhost.localdomain localhost
::1 altimeter localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
192.168.2.180 altimeter.mxtelecom.com altimeter

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
ff02::3 ip6-allhosts
=======================================================