Re: No ifconfig
On 2017-08-21, Greg Wooledge <wooledg@eeg.ccf.org> wrote:
> 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).
I have a tenuous understanding of just about everything, but I was going
to mention the wiki, which seems to dilute whatever savory irony the
so-called complete Linux specificity of net-tools might contain:
Take into account that the interfaces provided by net-tools, to some extent
are the portable ones across OSes to configure and handle some network stuff.
If net-tools is considered deprecated on GNU/Linux, please do not just remove
the support as that will break GNU/kFreeBSD for example which is using the
compatible freebsd-net-tools, or GNU/Hurd which can use the partial support
from inetutils-tools.
https://wiki.debian.org/NetToolsDeprecation
> 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*.)
>
>
--
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for the case after a precious violin has been broken and becomes useless. — "Ward 6"
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