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

[Rob Landley]

On 04/03/2013 09:05:26 AM, Bastian Bittorf wrote:
> it needed some days to find the right arguments, but i try to make it  
> short:
> 
> dont implement 'ifconfig'.

I didn't. A third party submitted it, because they use it. Nobody's  
ever bothered to submit "ip".

> it's totally obsolete since nearly 10 years. nobody uses it anymore,

*shrug* I use it. So did the people who submitted their implementation  
of it. It's in the $PATH on ubuntu LTS without me having to install a  
package to get it.

Could you be a bit more specific about what's wrong with it? So far  
you've said "ew", which isn't really an argument.

> even the manpage of 'ifconfig' shows this in
> big letters, it's so much restricted and doesnt know much about  
> networking,

Are you saying it's simple and minimal, just enough to get the job done?

This is a bad thing?

> it's a relict if the 1990's and must die.

Um, "cat" and "ls" are relics of the 1970's, are they on the hit list  
too?

> better make a stub of 'ip' and implement:
> 
> ip link add/del/show
> ip address add/del/show
> ip route add/del/show
> ip neigh add/del/show

What can you do with ip that you can't do with ifconfig/route?

> ifconfig is so fundamentally wrong in architecture, thats
> not worth the work.

I didn't do the work. I need to do the _cleanup_ work, but that tends  
to be true of most external submissions. (I'm picky. I'm also  
apparently unusually good at the programming equivalent of haiku.)

> for greybeards you can add a wrapper
> which translates every call to ifconfig/route/arp with a
> stderr output of "deprecated: use 'ip address show blabla...'".

I was planning on simplifying the underlying infrastructure rather a  
lot, yes.

> sorry for the hard words, but someone must say it 8-)

Why must someone say it? Neither is specified by Posix _or_ LSB. (I'd  
very much like it if somebody could point me to a standard for this  
crud. The closest I've got is man pages.)

I'm willing to be convinced, but that wasn't it.

Rob