Desired behaviour of "ifconfig -alias"

[Kevin Way]

Brooks Davis wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 09, 2007 at 01:49:08PM -0800, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
>   
>> On Fri, Feb 09, 2007 at 04:06:56PM -0500, Kevin Way wrote:
>>     
>>> I recently ran into a bug in the jail startup scripts that caused this
>>> command to be executed:
>>>
>>>     ifconfig bce0 -alias
>>>
>>> It turns out that this command eliminated the primary IP for the device.
>>>       
> It's way to late to make this change.  This is known behavior and has
> been for ages.  If there's a bug it's in the documentation.
>
> -- Brooks
>   
I'm as much of a change-hating curmudgeon as the next guy, but if
anybody is relying on
"ifconfig iface -alias" 's undefined behavior, then they deserve the
pain that will come with a fix.

As it stands the behavior appears to vary between drivers (archive
search shows that on fxp it
blows away all IPs, while on bce it blows away the primary IP, leaving
all aliases intact.)

Am I missing a reason that this could ever be desirable?  If it was
consistent, I could see an
argument for documentation.  But as it stands, the only thing to
document would be that the
behavior varies between drivers, and a fix has been declined on the
basis of momentum.

At a minimum can this get normalized in -HEAD?

--Kevin Way