<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>michaelmrose</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not that it doesn&amp;#x27;t play fair. Sun published under a license that made inclusion in the kernel impossible thus the current developers are bound by the same decisions regardless of their opinion on the matter.&lt;p&gt;Furthermore it is profoundly curious to claim that a cross platform filesystem that began life on Solaris and existed for years as a stable complete work before being ported to several OS including Linux becomes by virtue of a bridge a derivative work of Linux. It&amp;#x27;s magical thinking.&lt;p&gt;It is entirely acceptable that they aren&amp;#x27;t responsible for out of tree code working but it would be great if they didn&amp;#x27;t deliberately sabotage other projects which is what they did here.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;My tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existant.  Sun explicitly did not want their code to work on Linux, so why would we do extra work to get their code to work properly?&lt;p&gt;The extra work is 10 seconds of work. How childish and unprofessional.</text></item><item><author>sheepdestroyer</author><text>ZFS is not user land. It&amp;#x27;s kernel code but without being in the kernel. So it has to be built separately and may not even be compliant with GPL (still has to be tested in court AFAIK). Linux&amp;#x27;s promise to not break userspace is just that, It can not be held responsible for code that should be in the kernel but does not play fair with the license.</text></item><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>inshadows</author><text>&amp;gt; The extra work is 10 seconds of work. How childish and unprofessional.&lt;p&gt;While Oracle keeping the code under incompatible license for more than 10 years is totally OK.</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>michaelmrose</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not that it doesn&amp;#x27;t play fair. Sun published under a license that made inclusion in the kernel impossible thus the current developers are bound by the same decisions regardless of their opinion on the matter.&lt;p&gt;Furthermore it is profoundly curious to claim that a cross platform filesystem that began life on Solaris and existed for years as a stable complete work before being ported to several OS including Linux becomes by virtue of a bridge a derivative work of Linux. It&amp;#x27;s magical thinking.&lt;p&gt;It is entirely acceptable that they aren&amp;#x27;t responsible for out of tree code working but it would be great if they didn&amp;#x27;t deliberately sabotage other projects which is what they did here.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;My tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existant.  Sun explicitly did not want their code to work on Linux, so why would we do extra work to get their code to work properly?&lt;p&gt;The extra work is 10 seconds of work. How childish and unprofessional.</text></item><item><author>sheepdestroyer</author><text>ZFS is not user land. It&amp;#x27;s kernel code but without being in the kernel. So it has to be built separately and may not even be compliant with GPL (still has to be tested in court AFAIK). Linux&amp;#x27;s promise to not break userspace is just that, It can not be held responsible for code that should be in the kernel but does not play fair with the license.</text></item><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>wtallis</author><text>&amp;gt; Furthermore it is profoundly curious to claim that a cross platform filesystem that began life on Solaris and existed for years as a stable complete work before being ported to several OS including Linux becomes by virtue of a bridge a derivative work of Linux. It&amp;#x27;s magical thinking.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not magical thinking. A work can be a derivative of multiple other works. It&amp;#x27;s completely plausible that adding Linux stuff to ZFS can make it a derivative work of Linux &lt;i&gt;in addition&lt;/i&gt; to being a derivative work of whatever else it is already a derivative work of. There&amp;#x27;s room for debate about how much Linux stuff (and of what nature) something like ZFS can incorporate before it becomes a derivative work according to copyright law and the GPLv2, but you cannot dismiss the idea outright.</text></comment>