On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 04:22:54PM -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:
The one thing I can't understand is why we still don't have "network
interface aliases" (equivalent to symlinks), so that systemd can name my
interface enp2s0 *and* eth0 instead of having to choose between those
two, just like it has no problem naming my SSD /dev/sda and
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-FOOBAR (and a bunch of other names as well).
Because a decision was made decades ago not to access network interfaces via
/dev and changing that now would break a lot.
I wasn't suggesting to move network interfaces into the file-system
(e.g. via device files), but only to add a new feature to create
"network interface aliases".
Yes, but it isn't obvious how those would behave. For filesystems it's a
well understood concept. Also, for filesystems, it doesn't really matter
if there are multiple names. For network interfaces, since all of the
operations require special commands, which interface is returned when
you enumerate them, etc.? I suspect it would just cause even more
confusion.
