I think we can't disappear ifenslave documentation just yet (Was Re: Inclusive terminology (instead of master/slave) for network bonding/LACP)

[Andy Smith <andy@strugglers.net>]

Hello,

On Sat, Feb 24, 2024 at 10:52:17PM +0000, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> If anyone wants to remove the references to ifenslave and
> substitute others, that's entirely fine.

I really don't think in this specific case it would be a good idea
to remove all mention of ifenslave because:

- The current Ethernet bonding support in ifupdown requires
  ifenslave. If you don't install ifenslave, you can't set up a bond
  interface from /etc/network/interfaces except by avoiding the
  actual syntax there for that purpose and doing it with direct
  commands executed by *-up/down hooks.

- Even if it was possible, vast majority of people using bonded
  Ethernets have it done with ifenslave, so it needs at least a
  mention in order that people can understand what they already have.

- ifenslave is a tiny part of the issue. It's fundamental to the
  bonding driver and same terminology will be seen in its
  configuration and in its status output in /proc/net/bonding, e.g:

    $ cat /proc/net/bonding/bond0 
    Ethernet Channel Bonding Driver: v5.10.0-0.deb10.16-amd64

    Bonding Mode: fault-tolerance (active-backup)
    Primary Slave: None
    Currently Active Slave: eth1
    MII Status: up
    MII Polling Interval (ms): 100
    Up Delay (ms): 0
    Down Delay (ms): 0
    Peer Notification Delay (ms): 0

    Slave Interface: eth0
    MII Status: up
    Speed: 1000 Mbps
    Duplex: full
    Link Failure Count: 1
    Permanent HW addr: 00:25:90:5c:f7:ea
    Slave queue ID: 0

    Slave Interface: eth1
    MII Status: up
    Speed: 1000 Mbps
    Duplex: full
    Link Failure Count: 1
    Permanent HW addr: 00:25:90:5c:f7:eb
    Slave queue ID: 0

As I've already mentioned though, if anyone finds time to
investigate the teaming driver then it would be really nice to see a
wiki article on that and perhaps a link to that from the existing
one on bonded Ethernets.

So in summary, I don't think ifenslave can actually be purged from
history, but some useful steps could possibly be taken towards its
deprecation - first involving actually documenting the new thing.

Thanks,
Andy

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