http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=492665 User jengelh@medozas.de added comment http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=492665#c36 --- Comment #36 from Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@medozas.de> 2009-08-17 06:08:56 MDT ---
because ISVs go for the greatest common denominator on unixish systems.
I already invalidated this argument: the BSD and Solaris ifconfig output actually resembles that of iproute2's.
what kinds of problems are we talking about in ifconfig and route? functional deficiencies in the sense that iputils are simply more complete, or are these actual bugs
It's like a Kinder Surprise Egg, with “three things at once”: functional deficiencies, logistic deficiencies, and bugs. See http://jengelh.medozas.de/2008/0219-ifconfig-sucks.php
a) send warnings to stderr not stdout, so we're not messing up scripts which parse the output
Sending warnings to stderr can, on the other hand, trip up programs which expect real warnings on stderr, not some informational message that I am proposing. stdout was also chosen, because users might use $PAGER which commonly overwrites screen lines with stdout output, giving no way to show stderr messages in interactive mode unless the user explicitly uses 2>&1. ifconfig has been a free-form format for all time anyhow, scripts parsing ifconfig output walk on thin ice anyway, and the proposed message does not change that, nor does it contain any keyword that, IMO, would change the most common grep operations. -- 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.