Re: Time to phase out net-tools?
On Fri, 13 Jun 2008, Martín Ferrari wrote:
> Both, I know that many people had written stuff on top of that output
> and interface.
Including Debian.
> > net-tools doesn't suffer any showstoppers, is there a good reason to
> > replace it at this time? iproute is indeed much better, but it is not even
> > part of a standard Debian install currently. Maybe that's something that
> > we should start with if we want to migrate towards iproute.
>
> It's not something to be done in a day. But I think that given the
> amount of bug net-tools has, and the fact that it can't do much of the
> cool stuff provided by 2.4+ kernels, it's time for its retirement. And
> yes, iproute should become priority important.
You could have that as a release goal for lenny+1: net-tools as an optional
package. This means changing everything in Debian that uses net-tools to
iproute (except for other optional packages), which could be a good thing by
itself. We do need some forced churning on part of our network
infrastructure, after all.
But to rewrite net-tools as wrappers for iproute? I fail to see the point.
It is just wasted effort, IMHO. They already work, and they're not using
deprecated interfaces to the kernel AFAIK (if they are, things change). I
think it is better to direct our efforts to stop using net-tools as much as
we can, so as to make the package optional... that alone will take a lot of
effort by itself.
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh
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