wireless-tools/net-tools are DEPRECATED

[Miloslav Trmač]

On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 7:11 PM, Xose Vazquez Perez
<xose.vazquez at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 03/28/2011 09:00 PM, Bill Nottingham wrote:
>> Not to be entirely glib, but with this and the net-tools dependencies...
>> we're taking patches. Mere notification is not as useful as
>> contribution.
>
> Some of them are so trivial, that it looks like nobody is working
> on it:
Have you actually looked at these uses?

> $ rpm -ql initscripts | xargs egrep "/route |/ifconfig " --color
> /etc/rc.d/init.d/network:              /sbin/route add -$args

$args is arbitrary and user-specified, so if you want to replace this
line, you'd need to build something that transparently converts
arbitrary arguments to route(8) to arguments to ip(8) - but why bother
doing this at all, really?  I can't see what would we gain by
replacing /sbin/route with /sbin/route-through-ip, and replacing a
dependency on net-tools with a dependency on net-tools-emulator.

> /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-aliases:eval $(LC_ALL= LANG= /sbin/ifconfig | LC_ALL=C sed -n '
ifup-aliases is a huge, complex shell script, and AFAIK the "ip" way
of doing things is rather different. Porting ifup-aliases line-by-line
is probably possible, but hardly the obviously right thing to do.

Both of these cases are strongly tied to the old syntax/semantics, and
AFAIK only rarely used.

> It's a *shame* that all leading distributions, still rely on the
> old *BSD way to do networking.
Does it actually hurt anything?  I'd say that if these are the most
important uses you could find, the porting effort is basically
finished.
    Mirek