Hi! On Tue, 2015-09-08 at 12:56:09 +0300, Martín Ferrari wrote: > On 08/09/15 12:34, Thorsten Glaser wrote: > > I need reliable, consistent, parsable output across all Debian versions > > (and some derivates). > > There is no software that currently offers that promise. I understand it > is annoying, and myself have reported a bug to iproute2 (#726417) for a > similar situation, but the maintainer also did not want to diverge from > upstream, so I had to live with that.
Well, the ifconfig implementation in inetutils provides selectable output formats, which might be close to that promise, but I think I agree in general that relying on this kind of output is not wise. > >> direcly parsing files in /proc/net > > > > Excuse me, but WTF? > > > > The standard Unix interface for things is stdout of other commands, > > as in, filters and pipes. ifconfig is *the* standard utility to get > > information about interfaces. > > Sorry, but ifconfig output is not standarised by policy or any other > doc. In fact, it varies wildly in its many implementations. It has been > deprecated as a means of talking with the network stack in Linux since > iproute exists, which is a Long Time Ago. Yes, see the above comment on inetutils' ifconfig selectable output. > Also, it is not breaking other Debian packages, nor it is > malfunctioning, so severity can't be more than wishlist. We might not know yet, I do actually expect this might break some stuff also parsing output from ifconfig. Perhaps a quick check could be performed on codesearch.d.n? > Finally, I have no intentions on maintaining a fork of net-tools to > support the 14 years old output format of ifconfig, so I am closing this > as wontfix. This is quite reasonable IMO. Thanks, Guillem
