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

[Bastian Bittorf]

* Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> [03.04.2013 21:44]:
> >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.

8-) ofcourse i overdraw and provoked.

> >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?

if it _would_ be simple, minimal and useful then nobody would use 'ip'

> >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?

cat makes sense, ls is useful enough that we all can live with it's
errors. (i dont know a better tool to do this job).

> >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?

- all the IPv6 stuff
- CIDR-notation
- aliases + multiple IP's on one interface
- correct output of aliases
- tunnels
- more than one routing table ("policy routing")
- preparing traffic control
- better readable scripts (!)
  e.g. get the default route: 'ip route list exact 0/0'
- better parseable output (if needed, e.g. ip -oneline link show tun0)
- you can rename interfaces
- multicast working
- fine control over all netlink-params (e.g. txqueuelen)
- http://inai.de/2008/02/19
- http://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/1a7z6z/the_missing_man_page_for_ifconfig_xpost_from/

ofcourse i'am fine with both implementations, but IMHO
it's better to let 'ifconfig' die, than to enforce people
to learn the syntax for 4 tools (ifconfig, route, arp,
netstat - which are doing the same (manipulating network-stack) but
inconsitently), instead of 1 tool which has the same clean
syntax everywhere.

bye, bastian

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