svn commit: r217013 - in head: sbin/ifconfig sys/net

[Garrett Cooper]

On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 11:09 AM, Bjoern A. Zeeb <bz at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Jan 2011, Marius Strobl wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Jan 05, 2011 at 03:34:30PM +0000, Bjoern A. Zeeb wrote:
>>>
>>> On Wed, 5 Jan 2011, Marius Strobl wrote:
>>>
>>>> Author: marius
>>>> Date: Wed Jan  5 15:28:30 2011
>>>> New Revision: 217013
>>>> URL: http://svn.freebsd.org/changeset/base/217013
>>>>
>>>> Log:
>>>> Teach ifconfig(8) the handy shared option shortcut aliases the NetBSD
>>>> counterpart also takes, i.e. "fdx" for "full-duplex", "flow" for
>>>> "flowcontrol", "hdx" for "half-duplex" as well as "loop" and "loopback"
>>>> for "hw-loopback".
>>>
>>> I am not sure this is a good idea.  Unless this is really really
>>> useful for compatibility with scripts (which I doubt) it'll sooner or
>>> later cause headaches, especially given some of the (new) names could
>>> be very well used for different things as well.
>>
>> Could you please elaborate on what different use you have in mind?
>> Generally it seems a bad idea to me if the existing options and the
>> new names as implemented would trigger different things as you suggest
>> given the latter are rather common abbreviations as well as diverging
>> from the user interface of the other BSDs seems like a bad idea (i.e.
>> not only not supporting the same names they do but also controlling
>> different things with a given one). Also the concept of aliases taken
>> by ifconfig(8) isn't new, we support several including f.e. "auto" for
>> "autoselect" for quite some time.
>
> "flow" is a term used at other layers as well and really different to
> flow control.  We are not only seeing discussions about flowid usage
> in IPv6 but also people trying to control "ULP flows" on NICs (RSS).
>
> loop and loopback sound bad as well, especially as I could only see
> one man page in man4 (tl.4) that actually references it.
>
> My worries are just that people will confuse those things with other
> options outside of media-opts.
>
> I guess I have no problem with fdx and hdx but you will see a mix
> other either showing up then in scripts and man pages and that'll give
> an incosistent view to users and confuse them as well (especially
> since those options are all descriped with the driver's man pages
> rather than having a global list [if needed with aliases] in ifconfig
> then refering to the driver man pages to see which of those a driver
> actually supports).
>
>
> To give you an example -- "add" is an alias for "alias" with inet, and
> people are writing alias where add should be (different places on the
> command line) which leads to confusion as it shouldn't work there and
> doesn't for IPv6.  Much confusion for years.

    I agree with Bjoern. I realize people love abbreviations, but if
you have to spend more time disambiguating terms and defining what
overloaded terms are so that everyone can understand what they are,
then you aren't really saving that much time for a few characters (and
in fact you're making things more complicated by adding additional
available abbreviations to the supported CLI in ifconfig in this
case). I have enough trouble explaining non-Cisco industry terms to
Cisco people.
    Cisco loves abbreviations and TLAs (:)...) and other ways of
shortening terms for the sake of saving a few seconds of typing in an
email or a few breaths in a meeting, etc. I find it incredibly
annoying when I have to search Google for these terms (and maybe find
the answers, maybe not), because it's not saving me that much time.
I've run into this issue in other American companies with custom work
jargon on a day-to-day basis, and it varies from group to group, and
often conflicts intra-group. It would be nice if we avoided this
dumbing down for the sake of saving a few characters :(...
Thanks,
-Garrett