Re: inetutils

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Sat, Jun 02, 2001 at 05:20:08PM +0300, Sergey Poznyakoff wrote:
> I've got some notices about talk/talkd in inetutils. Here they are:

Cool stuff!

> So how about your idea of breaking the stuff into libraries? Oh, by
> the way, what was the reason of including ifconfig in the package? The
> stuff is heavily OS-dependent, it doesn't seem to belong here, does
> it? Anyway, I am trying to make it compile and work on Solaris/x86
> now...

I needed a place to put ifconfig for the GNU/Hurd system.  inetutils was
just the best fit.  It is not finished, although it works as far as it is
there, and we will see if and when we activate it for other systems beside
the Hurd.  Patches are welcome, of course.  It should already be very
compatible for the small set of features we support.  Note that the idea is:

To have a new set of (long) options which define the GNU ifconfig interface,
common to all architectures.
To remain backward compatible with the systems ifconfig on the command line
for this architecture only.
To be output compatible to the systems ifconfig by default (but the output
format can be changed by the user with --format).

The more fancy features of the network interface configuration are of course
quite different on different operating systems.  I am very unsure about how
desireable it is to put these into this ifconfig.  The ifconfig in
inetutils is modular to allow for system specific extensions, but we'll see
how much interest there is in using it.  I'm satisfied with covering the more 
or less
common subset.

Thanks,
Marcus

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