How Debian managed the systemd transition

> > I think that a more reasonable solution is to still provide the ethN interface name as alias of the new name.
> Network code doesn't support it and network devices have always been a 'special case' in Linux.
> Notice how there are no '/dev/ethX' files.

May be that *now* doesn't exist a technical solution for doing that. But I don't see any reason which prevent us to implement it.
Let me to rephrase my sentence: my suggestion could be cause of some problem, or today it is impossible because nobody had coded that solution.
The former may/is a stop, the latter could be solved by some hours of coding (and several days of testing :-) )