ifconfig provider for debian/ubuntu platforms

On Debian Wheezy (testing) and Ubuntu 11.10 and later releases for both, the "ifupdown" program can now take a "source" directive that reads interface stanzas from a specified file.

From the interfaces(5) man page (Ubuntu 11.10):

Lines beginning with "source" are used to include stanzas from other files, so configuration can be split into many files. The  word "source" is followed by the path of file to be sourced. Shell wildcards can be used.  (See wordexp(3) for details.)

This will require that users have their /etc/network/interfaces configuration set up to include a source line with the files they wish to include. This could be done with a wildcard, per the man page entry, e.g. "source interfaces.d/*". Such a thing could be handled with Chef::Util::FileEdit, but that seems heavy-handed.

The current ifconfig provider is RHEL specific. It would need to be moved to a new provider and the Chef::Platform default provider for RHEL-family set to use the new name (I propose redhat). Then this new provider would be appropriately named debian, and the default provider on Debian/Ubuntu.

The main issue I see with that implementation is that the Chef::Platform version specification does not allow setting "versions greater than..."

Debian bug resolving the request to add this feature (source directive):

• http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=471834