On Sun 14 May 2023 at 16:27:31 (-0000), Curt wrote: > Hence, our plans are to replace net-tools completely with iproute, maybe > leading the route for other distributions to follow. Of course, most people > and > tools use and remember the venerable old interface, so the first step would > be > to write wrappers, trying to be compatible with net-tools. > > At the same time, we believe that most packages using net-tools should be > patched to use iproute instead, while others can continue using the wrappers > for some time. The ifupdown package is obviously the first candidate, but it > seems that a version using iproute has been available in experimental since > 2007.
On Sun 14 May 2023 at 20:11:28 (+0200), to...@tuxteam.de wrote: > Thanks for the interesting data point. History seems to have unfolded > differently from plan (happens all the time :) but it wouldn't be too > late to fix. > > Who is writing the wrappers? In 2023? "Debian, as it happens, is having this discussion a bit late. OpenSUSE discussed removing net-tools in 2009, but has not done so. Red Hat and Fedora got serious in 2011, and the RHEL 7 release no longer installs net-tools by default. The fact that this change is not universally popular shows how reluctant users can be to let go of their long-used tools." AIUI people thought patching software that used net-tools was more productive than writing and supporting wrappers. "Distributors have to choose where to expend their energy, and there will come a point where dragging along obsoleted tools that the old folks want falls off the list." Final thought from this (lwn) source: "Software transitions like this are invariably an unwanted distraction for users who are uninterested in whatever new features are available and would prefer that their systems (and their habits) just continue to work. But the world we live in does not stand still, so such transitions are simply going to happen, and distributors will find themselves caught in the middle. As those distributors strive to keep everybody happy, we should not be surprised to see more of these transitions take a decade or more." Cheers, David.
