Re: how to find out regdomain/country of wifi network

[Andy Smith <andy@strugglers.net>]

Hello,

On Sun, May 14, 2023 at 01:41:40PM -0400, gene heskett wrote:
> On 5/14/23 12:09, Andy Smith wrote:
> > the arguments for its continued usage are extremely tenuous and
> > basically boil down to, "it's always worked for me!" Which is
> > fine, but does lead to situations like this where we have a
> > whole thread of confusion about why it doesn't have some
> > particular feature that a user, who was not aware that ifconfig
> > is no longer the thing to use, continued to try to use it.
> > 
> That is all fine & dandy Andy, but how about replacing ifconfig with a bash
> script that recommends to the user, ip for hard wired stuff, iw for radio
> stuff. User education solved in one swell foop.  Makes perfect sense to me.

By all means contact the current maintainers of net-tools and say
something like

    On behalf of experienced ifconfig users who also won't read
    manuals or do the simplest of Internet searches, please will you
    implement every command and feature of FreeBSD ifconfig but with
    prompts that direct the user to the appropriate command in
    Linux, for example if I type "ifconfig wlan0 list" then if wlan0
    is a valid wifi interface I want it to respond with "The correct
    tool for this on Linux is iw" instead of interpreting "list" as
    a hostname like Linux ifconfig did before wifi was a thing.

I am guessing for an even split between:

- No I don't feel like that is a good use of my time, sorry

and

- I hate this suggestion and think experienced ifconfig users should
  be able to work things out for themselves

but I'm not one of those maintainers so what I think matters very
little, those are just my predictions. Sending your suggestions
anywhere else (such as debian-user) will do no good whatsoever.

Personally I think time is better spent doing a 5 second search and
moving on with life.

Every thread about ifconfig now is just people wishing that other
people would do some work to keep it alive, when it's so far dead
that even mentioning it is now a distraction for people coming into
this after the thing ceased being relevant. The OP's user experience
would have been clearly better had there been no ifconfig command
even present in Debian - they would have been forced to search for
the correct command and would have found it very easily.

Thanks,
Andy

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