On Mon 15 May 2023 at 06:37:32 (+0200), to...@tuxteam.de wrote: > On Sun, May 14, 2023 at 01:59:10PM -0500, David Wright wrote: > > [...] > > > Final thought from this (lwn) source: > > > > "Software transitions like this are invariably an unwanted > > distraction [...] But the world we live in does not stand > > still, so such transitions are simply going to happen [...] > > To me, this seems like an unnecessary authoritarian stance, > which, in free software's context seems strange. > > As long as there are maintainers and upstream I see no reason > to drop a package.
It doesn't necessarily imply dropping any package, but just that if a new package is written that handles cases that the old package can't, then gradually the old package may break under various circumstances, and the people who might have fixed it may have moved on. AIUI, in the packages under discussion, ifconfig both lacks netlink support, and produces wrong information when it encounters information it doesn't understand. So the transition is not just because "ip is better than ifconfig", but because ifconfig just isn't up to it in certain situations. > Which one is the default, of course, is a decision to be taken > by the distribution as a whole. After all, the system scripts > have to be adapted to it. Choosing ifconfig as the default would be a strange choice indeed. > And whining is not maintaining, so if someone really wants the > package, (s)he better puts the keyboard where the mouth is :) I read somewhere that the recent tweaks (improvements?) to ifconfig's output were breaking scripts, which is hardly surprising. Cheers, David.
