Bug#798329: ifconfig: changed output format breaks scripts

[Martín Ferrari]

severity 798329 wishlist
tags 798329 wontfix
close 798329
thanks

On 08/09/15 12:34, Thorsten Glaser wrote:

> I need reliable, consistent, parsable output across all Debian versions
> (and some derivates).

There is no software that currently offers that promise. I understand it
is annoying, and myself have reported a bug to iproute2 (#726417) for a
similar situation, but the maintainer also did not want to diverge from
upstream, so I had to live with that.

>> direcly parsing files in /proc/net
> 
> Excuse me, but WTF?
> 
> The standard Unix interface for things is stdout of other commands,
> as in, filters and pipes. ifconfig is *the* standard utility to get
> information about interfaces.

Sorry, but ifconfig output is not standarised by policy or any other
doc. In fact, it varies wildly in its many implementations. It has been
deprecated as a means of talking with the network stack in Linux since
iproute exists, which is a Long Time Ago.

Also, it is not breaking other Debian packages, nor it is
malfunctioning, so severity can't be more than wishlist.

Finally, I have no intentions on maintaining a fork of net-tools to
support the 14 years old output format of ifconfig, so I am closing this
as wontfix.

-- 
Martín Ferrari (Tincho)