On Sat 19 Aug 2017 at 10:23:37 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote: > On Saturday 19 August 2017 09:30:10 Nicolas George wrote: > > > Le duodi 2 fructidor, an CCXXV, Gene Heskett a écrit : > > > So when do we get that ported and into debian, replacing this > > > gibberish generator called ip, so we can just get back to doing the > > > things we want to do with a computer? > > > > Never. Debian developers are not your lackeys. > > I (in the first person sense) do not expect them to be, but when a change > is made, and its not an improvement the users can see, as evidenced by > the level and tone of rhetoric seen here about it, whatever "it" might > be, something decent docs would tamp down, I'd expect some adjustments > to be made. Either in the docs, or the code. I don't believe for a > millisecond the writers are trying to make life for the average user > harder, "we understand it, why can't you", but we aren't you, we don't > understand why a useful tool has been deprecated.
I know this thread has been a long, interesting and involved one but it included this: https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2017/08/msg00798.html To remind ourselves (about why net-tools is not in the base system): Indeed. It shouldn't, and it doesn't anymore. Maybe net-tools should be part of the *standard* system, but it certainly does not belong to the *base* system anymore. Continuing: It is broken in that it just *can't* handle the Linux networking stack except for the bare minimum functionality on IPv4 (no, it doesn't meet even the bare minimum for IPv6), and the only reason we had to keep it around by default (consistent output that some scripts scrapped) was broken by GNU upstream when it took ifconfig out of the bit-rot pit hell and started maintaining it again. A minor effort in research comes up with a posting from 2009: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/03/msg00780.html Luk Claes and me, as the current maintainers of net-tools, we've been thinking about it's future. Net-tools has been a core part of Debian and any other linux based distro for many years, but it's showing its age. It doesnt support many of the modern features of the linux kernel, the interface is far from optimal and difficult to use in automatisation, and also, it hasn't got much love in the last years. The average user has to get their head round this (without invoking "I have eated my potatos mashed for the past thirty years") to understand why net-tools has been deprecated. And, of course, "deprecated" does not bar a user from installing the net-tools package. You know what? Both could be used. Ease yourself in! Quality of documentation in the iproute2 package? File bugs. (With patches). HowILearnedtoStopWorryingandLovetheiproute2Package sounds like a decent wiki title. It could have loads of examples and contrasts with ifconfig based on the knowledgeable contributions in this thread. Any takers (he says, not holding his breath). -- Brian.
