<story><title>Linux maintains bugs: The real reason ifconfig on Linux is deprecated (2018)</title><url>https://blog.farhan.codes/2018/06/25/linux-maintains-bugs-the-real-reason-ifconfig-on-linux-is-deprecated/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tw04</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s a great theory, but Linus picks and chooses when to decide it&amp;#x27;s outrageous to make changes that break userland tools based on his personal preferences.  They intentionally broke ZFS - then Linus follows up with a wildly inaccurate statement about why he thinks nobody should use ZFS.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s difficult to take him seriously when he picks and chooses when to enforce his supposed &amp;quot;never break userland&amp;quot; ethos.</text></item><item><author>fargle</author><text>This is &lt;i&gt;highly&lt;/i&gt; biased opinion piece. I like BSD. I liked pre-Oracle Solaris. And I like Linux at lot too.&lt;p&gt;And it is factually inaccurate. Deprecation of ifconfig is a distro issue. &amp;quot;Linux&amp;quot; did not deprecate it. And the reason is that it was unmaintained, not that it couldn&amp;#x27;t handle multiple IP addresses. In fact it can, I still use it 50% of the time. Works fine for setting and displaying multiple addresses.&lt;p&gt;The Debian maintainers wanted to drop it, and the other distros all followed suit a couple years later. Good information and links here:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;serverfault.com&amp;#x2F;questions&amp;#x2F;633087&amp;#x2F;where-is-the-statement-of-deprecation-of-ifconfig-on-linux&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;serverfault.com&amp;#x2F;questions&amp;#x2F;633087&amp;#x2F;where-is-the-statem...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Linux maintains known bugs – and actively refuses to fix them. In fact, if you attempt to fix them, Linus will curse at you, as manifest by this email.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;That is a bold statement but is not at all supported by the linked email. You&amp;#x27;ll see Linus cursing at a bad patch that would break something in userland, not for &amp;quot;maintaining a bug&amp;quot;. He&amp;#x27;s preventing at least two bugs (unnecessary change to behavior and ENOENT is indeed the wrong return value). I think I liked the old Linus better...&lt;p&gt;So it&amp;#x27;s a shame. I&amp;#x27;d love to read a series about BSD, but this is really just inaccurate propaganda.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gnulinux</author><text>Did you read his mail though? He literally answers this criticism. ZFS is not userland so kernel developers are free to break it, just like they can break ext4 and do, and then they fix them. The problem with ZFS is that they &lt;i&gt;can&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; fix it because it&amp;#x27;s not part of linux. It&amp;#x27;s a 3rd party kernel module. So your entire comment reads like a misunderstanding of the situation.</text></comment>
<story><title>Linux maintains bugs: The real reason ifconfig on Linux is deprecated (2018)</title><url>https://blog.farhan.codes/2018/06/25/linux-maintains-bugs-the-real-reason-ifconfig-on-linux-is-deprecated/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tw04</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s a great theory, but Linus picks and chooses when to decide it&amp;#x27;s outrageous to make changes that break userland tools based on his personal preferences.  They intentionally broke ZFS - then Linus follows up with a wildly inaccurate statement about why he thinks nobody should use ZFS.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s difficult to take him seriously when he picks and chooses when to enforce his supposed &amp;quot;never break userland&amp;quot; ethos.</text></item><item><author>fargle</author><text>This is &lt;i&gt;highly&lt;/i&gt; biased opinion piece. I like BSD. I liked pre-Oracle Solaris. And I like Linux at lot too.&lt;p&gt;And it is factually inaccurate. Deprecation of ifconfig is a distro issue. &amp;quot;Linux&amp;quot; did not deprecate it. And the reason is that it was unmaintained, not that it couldn&amp;#x27;t handle multiple IP addresses. In fact it can, I still use it 50% of the time. Works fine for setting and displaying multiple addresses.&lt;p&gt;The Debian maintainers wanted to drop it, and the other distros all followed suit a couple years later. Good information and links here:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;serverfault.com&amp;#x2F;questions&amp;#x2F;633087&amp;#x2F;where-is-the-statement-of-deprecation-of-ifconfig-on-linux&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;serverfault.com&amp;#x2F;questions&amp;#x2F;633087&amp;#x2F;where-is-the-statem...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Linux maintains known bugs – and actively refuses to fix them. In fact, if you attempt to fix them, Linus will curse at you, as manifest by this email.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;That is a bold statement but is not at all supported by the linked email. You&amp;#x27;ll see Linus cursing at a bad patch that would break something in userland, not for &amp;quot;maintaining a bug&amp;quot;. He&amp;#x27;s preventing at least two bugs (unnecessary change to behavior and ENOENT is indeed the wrong return value). I think I liked the old Linus better...&lt;p&gt;So it&amp;#x27;s a shame. I&amp;#x27;d love to read a series about BSD, but this is really just inaccurate propaganda.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>loeg</author><text>For a scary few days he was considering completely breaking the ABI of getrandom(2).  If he decides to break interfaces, I don&amp;#x27;t know that anyone can stop him.  It is a downside to the BDFL model.&lt;p&gt;Edit: Breaking ZFS is not a great example — as sibling comment points out, that is a kernel module using kernel-internal APIs, not userspace syscall ABI.  The Linux kernel notoriously considers all kernel interfaces unstable.  GregKH has in the past characterized this as a feature, not a bug.</text></comment>