While digging into a boot problem, I discovered something that looks a bit odd to me:

The initscripts package does not require (as per RPM) the NetworkManager package.  On my machines "rpm --test -e NetworkManager" doesn't complain, it says it would be ok to remove it.

At the same time, there is nothing in the scripts in initscripts that checks if the nmcli command  is available.  The scripts just runs it, obviously assuming nmcli to be there.

To me it would seem better if either
- the scripts checked if nmcli is available before trying to use it, or
- the initscripts package did require the NetworkManager package or the /usr/bi/nmcli file.

One COULD argue that it is correct as it is, and assuming administrators to know they have to set NM_CONTROLLED to no in all ifcfg files if they choose not to install NetworkManager.  This requirement is not very obvious to the administrator (a.k.a. me :-), though.