Re: how about ifconfig?

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Thu, Dec 28, 2000 at 06:53:25PM -0800, Jeff Bailey wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 29, 2000 at 03:06:45AM +0100, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> 
> > I am working on a simple ifconfig for the Hurd, but I try to write it
> > portable, so it can be used also on Linux and BSD. How about including it in
> > ineutils, it seems to be the right place, isn't it?
> 
> My vote is yes. =)
> 
> You used to maintain the inetutils package, didn't you?  I don't see it 
> on the package list.

It's not available on anything but the hurd-i386 platform.
There is a lot of work involved when we want to make it available to the
linux people, because we have to work out the right dependencies and
conflicts to make it possible to install it instead of the netbase & friends
utilities, and to make switching between those two work.

> I'm bundling up mailutils right now, do you want me 
> to do inetutils as well?

We can do it together. If you want, you can be the uploader etc, but I am
sure there will be a lot of things to work out where you can use my help (I
am mostly thinking of weird Debian packaging stuff). In fact, I don't think
I have the time to maintain it properly, so if you maintain it, I would be
cool with that. But see above for any attempts to make it work on linux.
 
> > A lot of advanced features of other systems will be missing in early
> > versions, but so what. Is ifconfig the best name? Are there de-facto
> > standards in options or output? It's long ago I looked at bsd systems
> > last time. I don't like the linux ifconfig, it's messy.
> 
> ifconfig is the right name, although the switches vary from system to 
> system.

That's good. I intend to provide my own gnuish set of switches :)

> > (this is at a *very* early stage, suggestions are welcome, but nothing too
> > fancy for now, if you aren't going to do the work :)
> 
> I suspect that it's best to have compatability flags for linux (to ease
> replacement in Debian and RedHat.. <grin>) but not worry about it after
> that. 

Linux uses some very strange set of command line options (mostly without
dashes). I think we can support most of them without worrying about it too
much.

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
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Marcus Brinkmann              GNU    http://www.gnu.org    address@hidden
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