Re: Can we kill net-tools, please?

[Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Wed, Dec 28, 2016 at 01:38:48PM +1000, Russell Stuart wrote:
> I don't know whether "crap" is the right word, but it is certainly
> baggage from a bygone era.  "Baggage" here means that if we are nice to
> our users (ie, Debian sysadmins), we should not force them to know two
> tools.  We only have one complete tool set available: iproute2.  This means at the very least ifconfg can not appear in any conffile, nor can it really appear in documented shell scripts like dhclient-script.

This is really going to be a generational thing.  For those of us who
started programming in the BSD 4.x days (my first kernel programming
experience was with BSD 4.3), ifconfig and netstat are still the tools
that I use every day, and I only use the iproute2 tools in the
*extremely* rare circumstances that I need to do something exotic
which is only supported by the iproute2 tools.

This probably makes me a bad person, but it's how I operate, because I
grew up using the ifconfig and netstat.  From my perspective, it's the
height of arrogance to decide that we're being "kind" to Debian system
administrators by forcibly taking away the traditional BSD tools, and
forcing them to learn a new interface, just because we think it's the
right and moral choice for system administrators.

If you want to deprecate ifconfig and netstat, the kindest way to do
that is to (a) remove all of the progammatic dependencies on ifconfig
and netstat output, (b) add hints to ifconfig and netstat which look
at how they were invoked and adds a one-line hint:

   Ifconfig has been deprecated; you should probably use "ip a show
   dev lo" instad of the shorter and more convenient "ifconfig lo"
   because debian is going to arrogantly make "ifconfig" go away in
   the next stable release, because we believe this is in your best
   interests, and Debian always has the priorities of our users at heart.

OK, you can remove the last half, but keep in mind there are plenty of
people who aren't using the exotic features provided by iproute2, and
are very happy using the more convenient and shorter BSD-style
commands.  If you're going to remove it _becase_, the least you can do
is to make the transition a bit more gentle.

Regards,

						- Ted