ifupdown in experimental uses iproute
Hello everybody!
I'm writing to investigate if someone has noticed that ifupdown in
experimental now has most net-tools (ifconfig and friends) commands
replaced by iproute2 equivalents.
(As you might be aware, iproute2 is a linux-specific tool.)
I don't know if there is any plan behind this for ifupdown, I guess one of
the reasons why it's in experimental is just because of the portability
concerns.
Using ifconfig on linux is kind of a dead end if you want to use any of the
more advanced networking features, which is why I (and many other linux
users) are interested in seing wider adoption of iproute2.
It has been said for a long time that ifconfig is deprecated on linux, so I
guess it's far overdue that we actually do something about this and not stay
in the current status-quo wishing for some solution magically showing up...
I see two obvious solutions:
1. keep several different code-paths depending on architecture in ifupdown.
2. write an iproute2 compabtibility command that can translate ip (and tc?)
commands to ifconfig and friends.
I guess the ifupdown maintainers aren't interested in having several
different code-paths, as it will most likely lead to many bugs that doesn't
get caught. On the other hand, writing a compability layer that can translate
iproute2 commands will probably be a non-trivial task or possibly even not
possible to make a good mapping between the different commands.
The reason I'm asking is because I'd like to work on improving the iproute2
version of ifupdown to the point where it can be uploaded to unstable,
but I'm not interested in non-linux issues, and if being portable is a
requirement I guess I have wasted alot of my time and effort on working
on something that will never go anywhere (which I obviously want to avoid as
well, been there done that).
Hopefully this can be a start of some constructive discussion, where people
mention what they are prepared to bring to the table themselves to make
things move forward. Simply stating the fact that iproute2 isn't portable
doesn't help anybody. Linux is after all a pretty big majority in the
Debian community, and according to my own experience holding back progress
to keep a minority happy have never worked out for the better in the long
run. I should probably also mention that, even if it might be way superiour
in theory, I'm not interested in starting over from scratch with a
replacement for the entire networking subsystem in Debian. Please keep this
discussion on the topic of how we can solve this in ifupdown on a shorter
timeplan (my goal would be to get all this included in lenny, but that might
be too optimistic).
(Please do CC me on replies, if you want me to answer to anything without
starting a new thread.)
--
Regards,
Andreas Henriksson
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