[arch-general] [arch-announce] Deprecation of net-tools

[James Rayner]

On Fri, 10 Jun 2011 08:19 +0200, "Rémy Oudompheng"
<remyoudompheng at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2011/6/9 Thomas S Hatch <thatch45 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Does netcfg still need net-tools? or can it be an opt depends? It was my
> > understanding that it only used ip unless specified otherwise.
> 
> Actually, I think it only depends on net-tools because there is some
> obscure option that allows users to make it run ifconfig with certain
> options. Of course, it could be replaced by an option that runs ip
> with custom options... All the remaining things are indeed done with
> iproute2
> 
> Rémy.

netcfg has an option that runs ip/iproute with any custom option
(routes, IPs anything), the option is "IPCFG". It may be seen in the
example ethernet-iproute[1].

IFCFG is the obscure command you mention, unfortunately it's not too
obscure, as this was how static IPs were set before iproute
configuration was added. It was retained for backwards compatibility.

The only reason net-tools was still a requirement was setting hostname.
A change similar to initscripts [2] at line 121 of
src/connections/ethernet [3] would suffice.

After that it ought to be safe to make net-tools an optional dependency.
Systems already using net-tools will keep functioning, and a notice
could be placed in code that handles IFCFG to advise those users to
migrate to the iproute configuration.

[1]
http://projects.archlinux.org/initscripts.git/commit/?id=f262299928f1aca454a0bbadbcda144b3fb2e7e2
[2]
http://projects.archlinux.org/netcfg.git/tree/src/connections/ethernet#n121
[3]
http://projects.archlinux.org/netcfg.git/tree/examples/ethernet-iproute