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There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc

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Re: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc

#181

Post by felixgallo »

xtrapolate wrote: post #167
felixgallo wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"others" would be right, but the present team doing the refactoring is actively, aggressively incompetent, doesn't listen to even constructive feedback, closes critical bugs with snarky comments, refuses outside contributions, claim outside contributions are literally impossible, and absorbs independent functionality in the name of empire building. So the notional idea of 'refactoring' being better -- yes! But with t…

Do I have to state the obvious? This is an open source effort. Not all attempts at persuasion bear fruit. If you feel you are being ignored (by what would appear is a group of maintainers you absolutely despise), I guess the other option would be to fork the repo. This would not be the first time in history people split code over disagreements.

Unfortunately, Red Hat have politically suborned all of the major distributions, and have rapidly and effectively created dependencies between their solution and other codebases in a transparent effort to create and maintain lock-in and to build barriers against the 'fork' strategy.

Re: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc

#182

Post by kashyapc »

yarrel wrote: post #170
kashyapc wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they really "terrible" with "awful usability"? In my day-to-day debugging, I do find `journalctl` much better. Let's see a couple of quick examples: - Show logs for the current boot: $ journalctl -b - To get all errors that are of priority level ERROR and worse: $ journalctl -b -p err - Show me logs for a given binary: $ journalctl /usr/sbin/libvirtd - Or via its unit file: $ journalctl -u libvirtd -l - Want to q…

Yes that is an awful soup of switches that should either be separate commands or usages of existing Unix tools.

Then you will have an awful salad of separate commands that you have to juggle around. I am all for "UNIX philosophy" within reason; it has its bounds, let us not over-romanticize it.

Re: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc

#183

Post by acqq »

davidcuddeback wrote: post #168
da_chicken wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BSD's ifconfig isn't really related to Linux's ifconfig anymore because BSD has continued development and the Linux fork or version (don't remember which it is anymore) hasn't. Linux's ifconfig is a part of net-tools ( http://net-tools.sourceforge.net/ ) and the latest release of net-tools, v1.6, was released in April 2001. It's been unmaintained for over 17 years. Some distros began deprecating ifconfig when the Lin…

> It's been unmaintained for over 17 years. So is the Linux ecosystem just going to rewrite tools everytime their original developer moves on or passes away? It's going to happen more in the future, so are we going to see more and more rewrites in Linux? There's something to be said about the BSD approach of maintaining the OS (kernel + userland) as a whole. They don't seem to have this problem.

One great thinker gave a very clear view of what is going on in so many open source projects:

https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

Re: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc

#184

Post by erikb »

da_chicken wrote: post #125
erikb wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "ip" is useless as a keyword if you're looking for help online. I don't know the decisions behind the naming either, but the ip shell command comes as part of the iproute2 [1] package. After I found out about this googling became much easier. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iproute2

Well, sure, but assume you're new and you don't know that. You can usually search for "man ip" to get close, but that usually just gets you a technical reference for an experienced user (the man page) and not a tutorial, introduction, or training doc for someone learning a new tool. "ip command tutorial" works well, though the results are still rather mixed. I get Cisco and Windows results as well until I search "ip…

Not sure why you think I would disagree. I'd say that is exactly my opinion, so I wanted to share that googlable term with the other frustated people out there.

Re: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc

#185

Post by dijit »

rkeene2 wrote: post #132
segmondy wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, you could say that again. I cut my teeth in Linux while in high school for the most path. First year of college, I go to the engineering labs to get a job, it's all SunOS/Solaris. It's like driving a car! There were very few commands that were different! Now, Linux is slowly going rouge and changing everything in the supposedly name of "progress" I'm still salty as hell with the systemd rubbish. The problem is t…

You do realize Solaris implemented a service management system (which is also superior to systemd; and was also created prior to systemd's conception), right ? They switched away from legacy SysV init scripts BEFORE systemd existed.

SMF was quite nice. Solaris was incredible in a lot of ways. I always wonder why it never took off.

Re: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc

#187

Post by sllabres »

foo101 wrote: post #147
rootbear wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is ridiculous. I would love to know their justification for using single dash for long options. When did that become the "old way"?? Very old X11 commands and many Solaris commands use a single dash, but nearly all modern commands use double dash. And I agree that this syntax makes it hard to combine single-character options. They must have had a very compelling reason to use a non-standard option syntax.

openssl uses single dash for long options too: -inform, -outform, -text, -noout, etc. gcc uses single dash for long options too: -std, -pedantic, -dumpspecs, etc. I am sure there are many more modern commands that do this.

As most applications older than a year are called legacy nowadays gcc (~30 YO) or openssl (~20 YO) are not what comes into my mind when asked for "modern" commands.

Neither are for 'dd' or 'tar' (probably 30 YO) from the other comment.

There are probably other, younger commands not following the --long-option pattern, but i think that doesn't make it better to break this convention.

Re: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc

#188

Post by rootbear »

brian_cunnie wrote: post #157
rootbear wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is ridiculous. I would love to know their justification for using single dash for long options. When did that become the "old way"?? Very old X11 commands and many Solaris commands use a single dash, but nearly all modern commands use double dash. And I agree that this syntax makes it hard to combine single-character options. They must have had a very compelling reason to use a non-standard option syntax.

The Golang flag [0] package uses a single dash for long options. The flags that a UNIX command uses can sometimes used to carbon-date that command. For example, dd(1) doesn't use a dash at all, uses long args, and uses an equals-sign to connect a flag with its argument (e.g. `dd if=/dev/null`). It's because dd(1) was written in the dawn of UNIX, before a convention was established for flags. I believe the first step…

The dd syntax is meant to mirror that of the IBM JCL command dd, and it may have been meant as a joke.

Old versions of sort used a + to begin some options. So yes, there has been a lot of variation over time, but I see no reason to gratuitously diverge from the common standards now in use, unless following them is too restrictive in some way.

Re: There are real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, etc

#190

Post by gsich »

kees99 wrote: post #88
pas wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to get the gateway: ip route show default > > ifconfig's output is simply more readable IMO I prefer iproute2's terseness.

When asking "what's the default gateway?", more often than not, the real question you have is "what's the gateway to IP address X", which would be: ip route get X

Then reask: whats the gateway to 0.0.0.0/0
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