Re: No ifconfig

[Greg Wooledge <wooledg@eeg.ccf.org>]

On Mon, Aug 21, 2017 at 05:58:43AM +0100, Jonathan de Boyne Pollard wrote:
> van Smoorenburg init and systemd actually have nothing whatsoever to do with
> it.  ifconfig uses one Linux API for sending information to and from the
> kernel, ip uses a different Linux API.  Ironically, the net-tools package is
> completely Linux-specific *anyway*, so the usual argument that ifconfig
> couldn't be changed to use the other API, because it has to remain portable,
> does not hold any water.

The basic command-line syntax of ifconfig is pseudo-standardized across
dozens of legacy Unix systems, as well as BSD.  *This* is what people
are really complaining about here -- the divergence of Linux from the
rest of the Unix-speaking world (in addition to breaking backward
compatibility with itself).

E.g. Solaris 10: <http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/816-5166/6mbb1kq31/>
E.g. HP-UX 11i: <http://nixdoc.net/man-pages/HP-UX/ifconfig.1m.html>
E.g. AIX 6.1: <https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/ssw_aix_61/com.ibm.aix.cmds3/ifconfig.htm>
E.g. OpenBSD 6.1: <http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-6.1/ifconfig>

I think updating net-tools to incorporate whatever new Linux network
stack features it's currently not supporting would make a lot of
people happy, so long as it doesn't break backward compatibility.

(Like Gene, I don't even know what those featues *are*.)