[Toybox] complaining about 'ifconfig' - better use 'ip'

[Isaac Dunham]

On Wed, 3 Apr 2013 17:28:00 +0200
Bastian Bittorf <bittorf at bluebottle.com> wrote:

> * Isaac Dunham <idunham at lavabit.com> [03.04.2013 17:16]:
> > I learned Linux in 2006, and use ifconfig all the time.  
> > It's much more informative, much more obvious to use 
> 
> ofcourse this is always, from which side you are looking.                                                                                                      
> 
> if you are used to 'ifconfig' and never used 'ip' than you                                                                                                     
> have to read something about it. same vica versa. if you are                                                                                                   
> really using 'ifconfig', you should better switch now. the                                                                                                     
> pain will be much worse if you wait again 2 years...   

If you would read the first _four_ lines instead of the first three, you would see that your response fails to address what I was saying
(NOTE: there's more information after this quote):

>> (look at the output of "ifconfig", then that of "ip", and tell 
>> me how on earth you're going to figure out how to troubleshoot 
>> a network connection given a rescue/install environment without
>> a manpage or reference),

Such situations _do_ occur--I've ended up in them several times.
The people who stopped using Arch because of the switch did so because they couldn't get networking in the installer.

If you know the command to use, ifconfig is already useful. 
And the "--help" is informative enough to start using it.
ip just tries to give you a help message; I say tries because it fails to actually provide any information for someone who just knows "use ip".

> PS:
> ip address add 192.168.1.2/24 dev eth0                                                                                                                         
> ip address show                                                                                                                                                
> ip route list exact 0/0 table
mytable
> ip route get
10.63.12.4
> ip neigh show

Thanks for the examples.
And just to add one essential example:
ip link set eth0 up = ifconfig eth0 up

-- 
Isaac Dunham <idunham at lavabit.com>