Comment 9 for bug 993298

The previous poster wrote: "But prior to Ubuntu 12.04, NM didn't start a local nameserver at all; no DNS lookups were done externally and /etc/hosts wasn't respected then either."

IMO this is not true. I've got no instance of dnsmasq running and entries in /etc/hosts are respected when e.g. letting Firefox (or any other application I've access to) resolve URLs.

AFAIK /etc/hosts is in not directly linked to dnsmasq and it doesn't matter whether DNS lookups are done externally or not. The hosts mechanism is much older than dnsmasq. For backwards compatibility it has always been maintained as a first layer of resolving host names. IMO it is most unusual for a Linux distribution to provide a default configuration that does not respect /etc/hosts. To my knowledge there's no other operating system distribution (including Mac + Windows) that does so.

Of course you are free to configure default Ubuntu as you like. But it would be great to respect published upgrade policy. What happened is that the upgrade to 12.04 silently changed the configuration in a way that broke all working /etc/hosts configurations. It is basic Debian/Ubuntu policy that such a thing should not happen without at least consulting the user and giving him/her a choice or a heads up.