>> If there are desires to improve this (I hear Naddy grumbling!) then the >> stomach to break backwards compat must be present, or suggestions on how >> to do it without breaking backwards compat must be suggested. > >My suggestion is two-fold: > >* Introduce a new format. This new format will ignore # comments, > call ! commands, but otherwise pass on everything unchanged to > ifconfig. I'm neutral on the matter of retaining "dhcp" and > "rtsol" as shortcuts for "!dhclient \$if" and "!rtsol \$if". > >* To maintain backward compatibility, retain the old parsing for > hostname.* files. Interface configuration files in the new format > will have a different name; if.* or whatever. > >Does that sound workable?
Not really. The netbsd experiment with ifconfig file format does not appear to have been a success. reason why? ifconfig has a really crummy argument parser, with all sorts of side effects. hostname.* files were supposed to isolate people from some of those nasty effects. stated simply, it would not have helped Paul. He would have made the same mistake.
