Re: inetutils

[Simon Josefsson]

ams@gnu.org (Alfred M. Szmidt) writes:

> Thank you, I'm forwarding your message to bug-inetutils@ -- I hope you
> don't mind, but you raise some very good discussion points.
>
>    BTW, is GNU inetutils still of any value ? I see all the tools and
>    daemons have been rewritten outside of GNU, at least on my Debian
>    installations.
>
> You raise a very valid point, I think there is still some usefulness
> in the GNU network utlities in its current form -- many distributions
> are dropping telnet/telnetd, ftp/ftpd, etc, and other protocols that
> can be a bit tricky to setup with encryption.  And I think most people
> have switched to ssh/scp/sftp as the only thing for file transfer and
> remote access.
>
> So there is one side of me (the one who likes to keep old iron
> running) that would like to see the old protocols to live on and be
> maintained, and any missing "old" protocols should be added.  For
> example, gopher/d or finger/d.
>
> What might be more interesting is to see into the future, what other
> tools should we provide? What network tools should we add?
>
> I still think that GNU ifconfig is the most sensible ifconfig, and am
> immensly disapointed with how GNU/Linux has gone over to the ip tool
> -- same with the route command.  I also still get annoyed when I
> encounter the non-GNU ping ...
>
> What do people think about the future of inetutils?

I view GNU InetUtils mostly as a living museum, but given how
https://bootstrappable.org/ has led to renewed interest in ancient
toolchains I believe there is merit to support the utilities (if we
manage to release anything).

GNU Guix uses our syslogd as the default on all systems!  I doubt they
will stick to that forever though.

There are two network-related tools that I think we should have in
InetUtils: arp and netcat.  Arp is one of the ancient tools, and I have
a decent implementation around that I have wanted to add for a long
time.  Netcat is popular today, and the other implementations are in
quite a sad state.  I think only the OpenBSD implementation could be
classified as actively maintained today.

What do you think about adding arp and netcat?

Some review of existing netcat implementations would be useful, I
believe we should base our work on one of the popular ones out there to
be compatible.

/Simon

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