> > Even if we use /n instead of :n to try to keep this separate from the > > logical interface numbers I think we'd spend a year of our lives > > explaining that the number in the label has nothing to do with the > > number that ifconfig -a reports. > > true.
I'm not so sure about the "year" part, but I agree there is room for confusion. That said, in the simplest (and most common) case of a single IPv4 address on a given interface there is little risk of confusion because ifconfig will identify the address as "foo0" (not foo0:0) whereas ipadm would identify it as foo0/0. > > Thus I think it is better to either have free text labels. Or we could > > do alphabetic instead numeric e.g net0/a and net0/b. With alphabetic we > > could still auto-assign them. > > I like that suggestion.. the "/" saves us from collision with > both the hostname and the interface name-space. And I suppose > we can now drop the "-i" argument to addr commands since we embed > the interface in "label". Thoughts? Auto-assigning with letters seems possible but a bit awkward to me. For instance, what happens when `z' is reached: do we start with `aa'? `A'? I'm also wonder how intuitive this behavior would be to administrators in non-English-speaking countries. Further, if we do things right, commands that administratively expose logical interfaces should be part of history in a few years and ipadm will have a long and bright future, but will forever have this eccentricity. For those reasons, I still prefer the numeric approach, though I do prefer Erik's suggestion to the original label proposal. As for dropping the "-i": indeed, and given that an address object is always tied to a particular interface (now that we've got IPMP sorted) I much prefer having the interface name be part of the address object name. -- meem
