> > 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. > > but why do we need to auto-assign? Why can't we mandate that the > object provided to "create-addr" must be of the form <interface>/<string>, > where <string> is constructed from some well-defined set of chars (e.g., > [a-z][A-Z][0-9]'-')
Because then we're back in the soup of forcing the administrator to name all their address objects with names that are not hostnames. Yes, the "<ifname>/" prefix helps but I would expect that most administrators are still going to use the hostname. Further, given that these objects are not necessarily tied to any specific address (e.g, in the case of non-static addresses), it's nice to have a facility in the system for naming them automatically. > That also satisfies the unconstrained "vanity name for address" wish. To be clear, that's never been my wish. -- meem
