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Suppose you have a separate network interface that you use to connect to a corporate network. This corporate network has some structure to it, such that it's not a single subnet. Yet there's no reason to have your default route point to that company's router -- you still want to reach the Internet over your regular internet connection. What you want is to install a specific route for your corporate network's address range, rather than a default route. The attached patches allow you to specify a value for "DEFAULTROUTE" in your ifcfg-ethN file, which will result in a route being added for that subnet, rather than for "default". For instance, if you use eth0 to connect to your corporate network, which is 170.12.0.0/16, you can add the following to ifcfg-ethN: DEFAULTROUTE=170.12.0.0/16 and as a result, you'll end up with a route to 170.12.0.0/16 pointing out that interface.
Created attachment 100468 [details] patch for /sbin/ifup
Created attachment 100469 [details] patch for /sbin/dhclient-script
I forgot to mention that this change actually involves both /sbin/ifup and /sbin/dhclient-script, which are two different packages. I just chose one at random to file against, not being well-versed in how bug reports are handled.
Why not just have static routes for that interface?
For DHCP, you don't know the gateway ahead of time, so you need the DHCP agent to configure the proper route. And it seems proper to have this feature accessible in the same manner regardless of whether you're using DHCP or static configuration.
Well, I'd argue that the DHCP script needs to probably go away.
Closing; the best way to do this is with the static-routes file, and if that interface isn't working with dhcp, that should be fixed.