Desired behaviour of "ifconfig -alias"

[Brooks Davis]

On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 03:26:18PM +0100, Oliver Fromme wrote:
> JoaoBR <joao at matik.com.br> wrote:
>  > Brooks Davis wrote:
>  > > Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
>  > > > 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.
>  > 
>  > wellwell, we also were apes for ages but does not mean that we stay behaving
>  > like them  and if some still does so it is also never to late to change
>  > that  ;)
> 
> Changing the behaviour of tools always involves a certain
> danegr of breaking existing script.  That's especially true
> for symstem administration commands such as ifconfig that
> are running in automated scripts, and people depend on them
> for booting their machines remotely.
> 
> I'm not saying that people are intentionally using that
> syntax ...  Maybe they are, maybe not.  But you also should
> take into accounts that there might be scripts that use the
> syntax inadvertantly and happen to work correctly because
> of the current behaviour.
> 
> I'm also _not_ saying that the behaviour must not be changed
> at all.  But it should be done carefully, i.e. first to
> -current, with proper "heads up" warnings.  Don't change
> it in RELENG_6 without warning and expect evrybody to be
> happy.

This is the point I attempted to make and failed at earlier.  The
general policy would be that we could change it to fail in current, but
doing more than emitting a warning in STABLE would be risky.

-- Brooks
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