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

[Bjoern A. Zeeb]

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.

/bz

-- 
Bjoern A. Zeeb                                 You have to have visions!
         <ks> Going to jail sucks -- <bz> All my daemons like it!
   http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/jails.html