From a SLES perspective, one could even make a point that if there are serious
http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=492665 User okir@novell.com added comment http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=492665#c35 --- Comment #35 from Olaf Kirch <okir@novell.com> 2009-08-17 04:20:55 MDT --- I think we agree that we can't just remove or break these commands. There are still casual users who at least use these tools for displaying network configuration status. People may even have scripts looking at these outputs. Third party software probably relies on them quite a lot, because ISVs go for the greatest common denominator on unixish systems. [I looked at my 11.1 installation, and found scripts from python, yast2, qt etc all using ifconfig.] My fundamental objection to the proposed "print a warning" approach is basically tells the user he's doing something wrong and that he should grow up and RTFM. It's the kind of solution that's easy on the programmer but hard on the user (especially if there's no way of getting rid of these annoying messages). So if the use of tools like ifconfig, route etc is indeed a serious problem (which I'm not yet convinced of) then a good approach would be to suggest an alternative command line using the corresponding iputils command. For instance, if the user types "ifconfig eth0 10.1.1.1 netmask ..." then the tool should try to be as helpful as possible, and suggest "ip addr add 10.1.1.1/24 dev eth0 .." The more specific question I have is, what kinds of problems are we talking about in ifconfig and route? Are these functional deficiencies in the sense that iputils are simply more complete, or are these actual bugs where a user would not get the behavior to be expected? problems in ifconfig and route, we should see whether they can be fixed - Unix users migrating to SLES expect these to simply work. At a very minimum, I would suggest to a) send warnings to stderr not stdout, so we're not messing up scripts which parse the output b) make these warnings configurable through /etc/nettools.conf and/or $HOME/.nettoolsrc c) tell the user how to shut up the warning -- Configure bugmail: http://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.