svn commit: r257696 - in head: libexec/rbootd share/man/man9 sys/compat/svr4 sys/net sys/sys

[Adrian Chadd]

Gleb,

I think you are confusing evolving and improving with tearing out legacy
APIs.

You can likely do the former without the latter.

So don't think you need to stop fixing things. Just don't conflate removing
old APIs with evolving things. They're not the same thing.

Adrian
On Nov 6, 2013 1:20 PM, "Gleb Smirnoff" <glebius at freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 06, 2013 at 08:30:43AM -0800, Peter Wemm wrote:
> P> > Why should we support such broken configurations as running new
> kernel and
> P> > ancient core base system utilities? The efforts to keep this are much
> more
> P> > expensive, then yields.
> P> >
> P> Why? because up until now you could run a FreeBSD4 jail on a modern
> system
> P> and reasonably expect it to work.  No, we don't really "support" system
> P> level tools, but examining network state is widely used.  No, one
> doesn't
> P> run ifconfig to set interface configs in jails, but there's a lot of
> P> scripts to read the configuration.
>
> Examining interface configs are done via getifaddrs(3), which uses
> NET_RT_IFLISTL
> sysctl, and this is not touched by this commit.
>
> P> > But why the hell should we support an insane who will try to run
> P> > ifconfig(8)
> P> > from FreeBSD 4 on FreeBSD 11? Not speaking about this tool from
> 4.4BSD,
> P> > LOL :)
> P> > This is not what COMPAT_FREEBSD4 meant to be.
> P> >
> P>
> P> Insane? Perhaps, but it's keeping FreeBSD alive in a fairly large
> company I
> P> know of.  We'll have to locally revert this change, most likely, and
> spend
> P> time supporting it ourselves instead of doing other potentially more
> useful
> P> things to help FreeBSD in general.
>
> I will not agree that an insane idea gets sane, if it is performed by a
> large
> company. "Large" doesn't mean "right". Can you please describe the
> scenario that
> may urge someone to run ifconfig(9) that is several major versions
> backwards
> on a modern kernel? What does prevent someone to install appropriate
> world, or
> at least ifconfig(8)?
>
> May be it is worth to invest time into improving our upgrading technics?
> We've
> got freebsd-update(1). Doesn't it work for large companies? We have at
> minimum
> 2 years before 11.0-RELEASE will be released. We can invest time into
> upgrading
> technics, or into writing down compat layers. If you can explain what can
> prevent
> someone to upgrade ifconfig, but to push kernel to 11.0, then we could work
> on it. May be we should fix these obstacles on the upgrade path, instead of
> layering one compat layer over another?
>
>
>
> Ok, if you need to, you can just revert commit right here in FreeBSD svn, I
> will not start a commit war. I am already very close to abandon idea on
> cleaning
> network stack, since this work is very very ungrateful. Let it rot as it
> is.
> While other OSes are pushing forward, let us be an illustartion to
> "TCP/IP Illustrated: The implementation", published in 1995. After two
> decades,
> the closer 11.0-RELEASE in 2015 will be to original implementation, the
> funnier
> it'll be.
>
> --
> Totus tuus, Glebius.
>