Re: Can we kill net-tools, please?

[Bjørn Mork <bjorn@mork.no>]

Russell Stuart <russell-debian@stuart.id.au> writes:
> On Thu, 2016-12-29 at 11:38 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> It certainly doesn't provide a man page that doesn't start with a BNF
>> syntax description.  The iproute2 documentation is awful.
>> 
>> Also, this is not at all easy to parse:
>>
>> # ip -o address
>> 1: lo    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo\ valid_lft foreverpreferred_lft forever
>
> All true.  In particular the documentation produced by kernel's
> networking group is a pet hobby horse of mine.

It's a collaborative project open for anyone with the slightest
interest in it. Sure it can need improvements.  But complaining doesn't
really work.  Fix it instead :)

FWIW, I find it much harder to document a new feature than implementing
it. And I believe many others feel the same.  Any help improving the
docs is greatly appreciated.  New networking features often have a
narrow target and are added by a person knowing the specific area pretty
well, but not necessarily everything else...  Writing good docs in this
context is difficult because your point of view is so different from the
readers.

> To me this thread looks like a bunch of old men grumbling that the
> young'ins have taken over what they created and turned the tools they
> were comfortable with into something unrecognisable.  It's true - they
> did do that, and it's true it was unnecessary. 

Note that the reason there are two sets of tools is exactly because they
*didn't* turn the existing tools into something unrecognisable.  The
existing tools were left alone when the kernel API went from ioctls to
netlink.

But I see no point in the subject of this discussion.  Leave net-tools
as they are for anyone used to them.  "Priority: important" seems wrong,
though.


Bjørn