[email protected] (Alfred M. Szmidt) writes: > Thank you, I'm forwarding your message to bug-inetutils@ -- I hope you > don't mind, but you raise some very good discussion points. > > BTW, is GNU inetutils still of any value ? I see all the tools and > daemons have been rewritten outside of GNU, at least on my Debian > installations. > > You raise a very valid point, I think there is still some usefulness > in the GNU network utlities in its current form -- many distributions > are dropping telnet/telnetd, ftp/ftpd, etc, and other protocols that > can be a bit tricky to setup with encryption. And I think most people > have switched to ssh/scp/sftp as the only thing for file transfer and > remote access. > > So there is one side of me (the one who likes to keep old iron > running) that would like to see the old protocols to live on and be > maintained, and any missing "old" protocols should be added. For > example, gopher/d or finger/d. > > What might be more interesting is to see into the future, what other > tools should we provide? What network tools should we add? > > I still think that GNU ifconfig is the most sensible ifconfig, and am > immensly disapointed with how GNU/Linux has gone over to the ip tool > -- same with the route command. I also still get annoyed when I > encounter the non-GNU ping ... > > What do people think about the future of inetutils?
I view GNU InetUtils mostly as a living museum, but given how https://bootstrappable.org/ has led to renewed interest in ancient toolchains I believe there is merit to support the utilities (if we manage to release anything). GNU Guix uses our syslogd as the default on all systems! I doubt they will stick to that forever though. There are two network-related tools that I think we should have in InetUtils: arp and netcat. Arp is one of the ancient tools, and I have a decent implementation around that I have wanted to add for a long time. Netcat is popular today, and the other implementations are in quite a sad state. I think only the OpenBSD implementation could be classified as actively maintained today. What do you think about adding arp and netcat? Some review of existing netcat implementations would be useful, I believe we should base our work on one of the popular ones out there to be compatible. /Simon
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