> IMO the root problem if this breaks is mixing of autoprobe data with > user configuration. We need to fix it by unmixing those things, not by > breaking autoprobe or losing people's config files. Sure. But actually my problem doesn't need this sort of general solution. Rather, it needs the separation of what's kudzu's bidness and what ain't, which has already been mentioned. That is, for the case of network cards, I want to have custom configuration for "eth0" and when I swap out the motherboard and there is a different NIC flavor now, kudzu is damn helpful in updating the idea of what driver "eth0" means and I need it for that. So if that part of it is separated out into network-manager or whatever, I would just have that configured not to change anything automagically and be happy (disable network-manager, I guess, since I don't know what it is).