Comment 10 for bug 246322

It's not quite that simple - people use NIS on computers which move between networks, such as laptops, and run multiple NIS domains on the same network (which means that any DHCP configuration will only apply to some systems). This makes it difficult to tell if the configuration on the network applies to the current system.

Like I say, enabling DHCP support on systems where it was not previously enabled is not going to happen: the systems already work so any risk of breaking them is unacceptable, which means that this can't be enabled for upgrades. As I have said, it may be OK to default this on for new installs but never for old installs.

Something which overwrites the configuration unconditionally wouldn't be good enough - this would prevent use of any manual configuration and would doubtless lead to users having their configuration destroyed.