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Comment by ktta | Hacker News Reader

You might want to look into the history of net-tools and iproute2. `net-tools` was a big UNIX thing. That is the reason FreeBSD still uses it.

Since 2001 (!) `net-tools` hasn't been developed (!= supported) in linux. That's a heck of long time.

It isn't just about the about correcting the ioctl call, it is about re-engineering the complete suite of networking commands in net-tools. The iproute2 suite doesn't get stuff from /proc and ioctl calls, but rather does through netlink (because ioctl calls were being (ab)used a lot). So it is more performant.

It might seem absurd to optimize for performance, but its really not because its usage in scripts warrants it (especially because `iproute2` does a lot, lot more than what `net-tools` does)

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It's clearly too late for this battle, but I think this is a clear picture of 'Linux philosophy' vs 'BSD philosophy':

Ifconfig could have been augmented to support the new, performant ways to do the things, and the new, cool things; but instead, a new tool was developed and the old one deprecated. In FreeBSD, you still use ifconfig to configure interfaces, including wireless interface parameters, instead of another thing for that (iwconfig).

Churn and reinventing the wheel accomplishes nothing but creating busywork for many hundreds of thousands of users, creates an unnecessary learning curve and wastes time. They should've just fixed/rewrite net-tools for new interfaces and added flags for parsable output.

Breaking changes is very uncool.

Even Linus Torvalds dislike the ip command.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/1/1/128

And whenever i try to use it i find myself reminded, and not in any pleasant sense, of a crappy Cisco IOS clone.

The whole thing feels more at home as the default shell on a router than a tool on any desktop or server.

I know what you mean, and agree to some extent. But I doubt that statement holds up in this case.

>Ifconfig could have been augmented to support the new, performant ways to do the things, and the new, cool things;

I don't think that could've happened. You are thinking very narrowly, just about ifconfig command. Linux has a lot more networking things that aren't there in UNIX (or even in the BSDs for that matter). There have been many networking concepts introduced in linux that would warrant creating a completely different set of tools.

Ofcourse, shoehorning all the new features behind current net-tools binaries is an option. But if you see the elegance in the current with which `ip` can be used, I think you would reconsider your stance.

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