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

[Isaac Dunham]

On Wed, 3 Apr 2013 16:05:26 +0200
Bastian Bittorf <bittorf at bluebottle.com> wrote:

> it needed some days to find the right arguments, but i try to make it short:
> 
> dont implement 'ifconfig'. it's totally obsolete since nearly 10 years.
> nobody uses it anymore, even the manpage of 'ifconfig' shows this in
> big letters, it's so much restricted and doesnt know much about networking,
> it's a relict if the 1990's and must die.

One data point:
I learned Linux in 2006, and use ifconfig all the time.  
It's much more informative, much more obvious to use 
(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), and has clearer output.
ip suffers from UI design failure: it may be more capable, but try using it when you don't know how already and you will be lost.
I knew some people who stopped using Arch when ifconfig stopped being installed by default.
> 
> 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
> 
> ifconfig is so fundamentally wrong in architecture, thats
> not worth the work. 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...'".

-- 
Isaac Dunham <idunham at lavabit.com>


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