bin/88119: [patch] partial matching for ifconfig

[bw at desync.com]

The following reply was made to PR bin/88119; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: bw at desync.com
To: Brooks Davis <brooks at one-eyed-alien.net>
Cc: freebsd-gnats-submit at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: bin/88119: [patch] partial matching for ifconfig
Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 17:42:58 -0400

 Comments inline.
 
 On Fri, Oct 28, 2005 at 11:39:57AM -0700, Brooks Davis wrote:
 > Nice idea.  I'm not convinved of the implementation though.  First, the
 > isdigit() check is bogus because of interface renaming.  You might well
 > want to match all the wan interfaces on a system with a naming scheme
 > like lax-wan, sfo-wan, sea-wan.
 
 That's true.  This functionality might be less useful if your interface
 naming scheme doesn't have some sort of sensible prefix.
 
 The isdigit() call wasn't well thought out with regard to interface
 renaming.  I have revised the patch to match partially only if
 the interface specified doesn't exist.
 
 http://desync.com/~bw/ifconfig.partialmatch.revised.diff
 
 > I suspect it may also break "ifconfig gif create".
 
 It doesn't.
 
 > Second, this turns something that was previously an error
 > into something that works which may be confusing.  My suggestion would
 > be to implement a new flag, probably -e, which implements egrep style
 > matching using regex(3) (usr.bin/pkill looks like a good example.)  This
 > would be both more powerful and avoid the whole issue of POLA
 > violations.
 
 This is a very simple modification, intended to add convenience for those
 of us that use FreeBSD with lots of interfaces.  I don't think the
 addition of a flag or regex matching adds convenience.
 
 > -- Brooks
 
 bw.