Re: Time to phase out net-tools?
On 2008-06-13, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@debian.org> wrote:
> 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.
indeed, ifupdown being the most obvious impediment to making net-tools
priority optional.
>> > 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.
agreed.
> 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.
indeed net-tools is using deprecated ioctls to the kernel vs. the
netlink sockets that iproute uses. see for instance #222676, and the
fact that aliases created with 'ip addr add ...' don't show up in
ifconfig output.
mii-tool seems to be mostly superseded by ethtool.
nameif seems to be superseded by ifrename / udev.
rarp is obsolete.
iptunnel, ipmaddr, slattach, plipconfig?
--
Robert Edmonds
edmonds@debian.org
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