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

[Rémy Oudompheng]

On 2011/6/10 James Rayner <james at archlinux.org> wrote:
> 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.
>

I will add some warning about IFCFG. I made the needed change for
hostname and the next release will set net-tools to be optional.

I will need testers for the various patches I merged from the bug
tracker, notably IPv6. Any comments on the suggested implementation
are welcome.

-- 
Rémy.