> While I'm all in favour of being backward compatible, sometimes you > have to weigh up the advantages of continuing to support something > that has never worked well (eg modinsert/modremove) vs upsetting a > small number of people and just removing it to make the program just > a bit saner to deal with.
I'm not sure exactly how you're scoping "backward compatible" here, but to be clear: wholesale removal ifconfig is unacceptable from a compatibility standpoint, and I cannot recall any cases where we have removed a documented subcommand from ifconfig. For instance, with Clearview, a number of ifconfig tunnel subcommands will be supported by dladm instead, and we will encourage the use of the dladm subcommands. However, the ifconfig commands will continue to work. > Looking at our ifconfig, I think we are lacking a concise idea of what > it should or should not do. Is it there to administer network > interfaces? Or configure IPsec? Or to manage STREAMS modules? Or...? Historically, that's true. For the past several years, we have repeatedly said that it is about IP interface configuration. That means that link-layer configuration and other related junk can no longer be added to ifconfig. This is why we have introduced commands like dladm. -- meem _______________________________________________ networking-discuss mailing list [email protected]
